I knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of my life.

They used as a reason for my transfer [from one prison to another] that I refused to take some kind of shots, an innoculation or something.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

I had heard for years of Muslim hospitality, but one couldn't quite imagine such warmth.

That morning was when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been.

I hadn't hustled in the streets for years for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.

The white man's system has been imposed upon non-white peoples all over the world.

I simply refused to believe.