Top 100 Dick Gregory Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Because you make me laugh don’t make you a comic. A comedian is a person who, that’s how they make their living.”

— Dick Gregory

52. “Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.”

— Dick Gregory

53. “Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf.”

— Dick Gregory

54. “When you look at Hitler and those thugs, you can put Walmart right next to them.”

— Dick Gregory

55. “A friend of mine who works for naval intelligence said an aerial satellite revealed that 1.9 million attended the event in 1995. But if they would have had a rumble at the march the newspapers would have said that 75 million Afro-Americans were there.”

— Dick Gregory

56. “It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.”

— Dick Gregory

57. “Every holiday on the calendar, I check in a hotel and fast – I don’t eat, I don’t drink, I don’t talk.”

— Dick Gregory

58. “Truth is the baby of the world. It never gets old.”

— Dick Gregory

59. “Once we used to have to crank up our cars, now you can pop it on from inside your house. Everything has changed except how we get freedom.”

— Dick Gregory

60. “We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.”

— Dick Gregory

61. “Eating liver out of a cow’s body is like eating the filter out of a car.”

— Dick Gregory

62. “In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don’t know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.”

— Dick Gregory

63. “When I was a boy, I was taught never to use insulting expressions like, ‘I’ve been gypped,’ or, ‘He welshed on the deal.’”

— Dick Gregory

64. “Once I realised the value of making people laugh, I got very good at it. Fast.”

— Dick Gregory

65. “You got to die of something because if you die of nothing, they won’t pay your insurance.”

— Dick Gregory

66. “Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ “I said: ’that’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”

— Dick Gregory

67. “Some kind of way, we have to say enough is enough.”

— Dick Gregory

68. “Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.”

— Dick Gregory

69. “Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.”

— Dick Gregory

70. “The jelly-bean eating thug says that national defense is important. But national defense starts at home.”

— Dick Gregory

71. “I’m not a comic. I’m a humorist.”

— Dick Gregory

72. “You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We’re the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.”

— Dick Gregory

73. “America is concerned more with the possibility of moon folks than the reality of hungry poor folks.”

— Dick Gregory

74. “America will tolerate the taking of a human life without giving it a second thought. But don’t misuse a household pet.”

— Dick Gregory

75. “I used to get letters saying, ‘I didn’t know black children and white children were the same.’”

— Dick Gregory

76. “Black conservatives have a right to exist, but why would I want to walk around with a swastika on my shirt after the way Hitler done messed it up?”

— Dick Gregory

77. “Dogs are great assets to candidates, and the feeling seems to be engendered that if a dog loves the candidate, he can’t be all that bad.”

— Dick Gregory

78. “If it wasn’t for Abe Lincoln, I’d still be on the open market.”

— Dick Gregory

79. “Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town.”

— Dick Gregory

80. “Everything we do we should look at in terms of millions of people who can’t afford it.”

— Dick Gregory

81. “We thought I was going to be a great athlete, and we were wrong, and I thought I was going to be a great entertainer, and that wasn’t it either. I’m going to be an American Citizen. First class.”

— Dick Gregory

82. “I buy about $1,500 worth of papers every month. Not that I trust them. I’m looking for the crack in the fabric.”

— Dick Gregory

83. “My belief is, you know, certain things have to be explained that’s never been explained.”

— Dick Gregory

84. “Wouldn’t it be a helluva joke if all this were really burnt cork and you people were being tolerant for nuthin’?”

— Dick Gregory

85. “What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.”

— Dick Gregory

86. “I didn’t realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.”

— Dick Gregory

87. “What I’ve come to learn in my long life is that ignorance is not bliss; it is time consuming and costly as hell.”

— Dick Gregory

88. “I believe young voters will either vote for Obama or not vote at all. So the problem is not Obama the problem is the system. If you think about how mess up this country is, most folk really don’t have choices.”

— Dick Gregory

89. “That’s easy, to stand in a nightclub, where most of the people that come in, they came to see you.”

— Dick Gregory

90. “If democracy is such a good thing, let’s have more of it.”

— Dick Gregory

91. “When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete’s feet don’t exist, there’s something wrong.”

— Dick Gregory

92. “Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I’m getting $5,000 a week – for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.”

— Dick Gregory

93. “Momma, a welfare cheater. A criminal who couldn’t stand to se her kids go hungry, or grow up in slumbs and end up mugging people in dar corners. I guess the system didn’t want her to get off relief, the way it kept sending social workers around to be sure Momma wasn’t trying to make things better.”

— Dick Gregory

94. “I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.”

— Dick Gregory

95. “In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it’s a sport.”

— Dick Gregory

96. “So why would I want to call myself a conservative after the way them white racist thugs have used that word to hide behind? They call themselves new Republicans.”

— Dick Gregory

97. “When you have a good mother and no father, God kind of sits in. It’s not good enough, but it helps. But I got tired of hearing Momma say, God, fix it so I can pay the rent; God, fix it so the lights will be turned on; God, fix it so the pot is full. I kind of felt it really wasn’t His job.”

— Dick Gregory

98. “Every door of racial prejudice I can kick down, is one less door that my children have to kick down.”

— Dick Gregory

99. “They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.”

— Dick Gregory

100. “Even though he understood the depths of racism and black oppression, Ali lived his life as a free man – a free loving and lovable man.”

— Dick Gregory