The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D. C., right now.
“Words and works eat not at one table.”
Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660)
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James Howell 19
Anglo-Welsh historian and writer 1594–1666Related quotes
“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
“We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.”
In Defense of the Earth (1956), The Great Nebula of Andromeda
The Pessimist, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Eating words has never given me indigestion.”
“Shabby, word-eating, pocket-picketing, sacrilegious villains.”
Of the Whig party.
Quoted in Arthur Burns, "Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–1873)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004