Top 100 Malcolm's Quotes
#1. The dream was ennobling but doomed. It was Malcolm's curse to see this before the most of the rest of us; it was the beginning of his sainthood that when black Americans reached that point--when they arrived, that is to say, at their blackness--Malcolm was already there.
Peter Goldman
#2. Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.
Helen Garner
#3. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's - raised and fisted or Martin's - open and asking or James's - curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa's or Ruby's gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .
Jacqueline Woodson
#4. Sophia, with real nobility of character, then asked Papa to explain something she had read in Sir John Malcolm's History of Persia, which the Vicar, whose only personal extravagance was his purchase of books, had lately added to his library.
Georgette Heyer
#5. light. "I'll ring Malcolm's mum's croft and have him
Allie Mackay
#6. When things are bad, we take a bit of comfort in the thought that they could always be WORSE. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get BETTER.' - Malcolm S. Forbes.
Rachel Renee Russell
#7. He tasted like gingermint and chocolate kulfi and something stronger and more powerful, something like want and need, and Owen drank him in and gave him back, dying for him in the subjective three hours it took to get to Malcolm's door.
Amy Lane
#8. Dicing with death is one man's cup of tea, but another man's poison. I just didn't fear anything.
Stephen Richards
#9. Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
Malcolm X
#11. Accepting blame when it's not really due sometimes makes the point better.
Malcolm Forbes
#12. No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
Malcolm X
#13. Our educational system is appallingly poor right now. Yet, somehow we're turning out some of the most intellectual and powerful sophisticated minds in the world. I think that's because we still have the opportunity here.
Malcolm Wallop
#14. Obviously it's hard for anyone to imagine, but these dance halls were powder kegs just waiting to erupt. Names were made and reputations were enhanced or blown in a flash!
Stephen Richards
#15. There's something about this place, about Madison and Wisconsin and the Midwest, that's really comforting, ... Malcolm in the Middle.
Jane Kaczmarek
#16. Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
Malcolm X
#17. You know, said Sergeant Benton, I'll never understand the Doctor. He's always so sorry in the end for the horrible creatures we come across. It isn't human. You're forgetting, said the Brigadier, he isn't.
Malcolm Hulke
#18. But MacCurdy's idea about near and remote misses suggests something quite different - that courage is in some sense acquired.
Malcolm Gladwell
#19. Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life. Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.
Malcolm Lowry
#20. All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.
Janet Malcolm
#21. It's really corny to say, but if you are happily married and have good kids, that is about 98 per cent of what you should be seeking to achieve.
Malcolm Turnbull
#22. Authority's for sharing only when the sharer is sure of his (or hers).
Malcolm Forbes
#23. When you have an organization that's neither political nor religious and doesn't take part in the civil rights struggle, what can it call itself? It's in a vacuum.
Malcolm X
#24. But who knows, some years from now if there's a global emissions trading scheme agreement, as many have hoped for, then I'm sure Australia would be part of it.
Malcolm Turnbull
#25. It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.
Malcolm Gladwell
#26. It's insanity for a party that believes in freedom to allow some Republicans to seize an agenda that is totally alien to the agenda that was established in the election.
Malcolm Wallop
#27. What advertising dum-dum signed up Ilie Nastase to sell a resort?! Who'd want to go where he's at?
Malcolm Forbes
#28. Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
Malcolm Bradbury
#29. It's great to arrive, but the trip's most always most of the fun.
Malcolm Forbes
#30. Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.
Malcolm Gladwell
#31. Holidays have been commercialized. It has become about material things. But the holidays are about sharing stories and being in each other's presence.
Malcolm D. Lee
#32. America's economic strength depends on industry's ability to improve productivity and quality and to remain on the cutting edge of technology, and that's why the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is so important.
Ronald Reagan
#33. But there's a huge blessing that comes from being a part of a show like 'The Cosby Show' that sets such a high standard of quality - it touched so many people on so many different levels.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner
#34. America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.
Malcolm X
#35. Can't you see there's a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.
Malcolm Lowry
#36. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.
Malcolm Blair-Robinson
#37. You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#38. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child's chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
Malcolm Gladwell
#39. Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. Well, he's not a weirdo. I didn't turn around to look at Malcolm because he was probably eating dish soap or mayonnaise or something.
Suzanne Selfors
#41. Government will not nominate the former Labor prime minister [Kevin Rudd] to be the UN's next secretary-general.
Malcolm Turnbull
#42. Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm
#43. You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
Malcolm Gladwell
#44. If you look at 'The Best Man,' there's a lot of humor in that, but I never consider that movie a comedy. I felt that it was a drama with comedic elements and comedic parts to it.
Malcolm D. Lee
#46. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedys - there is always a pattern where a piece of information is destroyed, in which a witness is killed. It's so predictable, you can go back and look up old cases.
Mae Brussell
#47. I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild.
Malcolm McDowell
#48. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Janet Malcolm
#50. The zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.
Malcolm X
#51. At EMILY's List, we're in the business of expanding the political power of women.
Ellen Malcolm
#52. Once in a while there's wisdom in recognizing that the Boss is.
Malcolm Forbes
#53. I believe it's a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself.
Malcolm X
#54. There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#55. To be a flamboyant failure, that's better than being any kind of benign success
Malcolm McLaren
#56. If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.
Malcolm Gladwell
#57. If it's lawful to have a rifle club to kill pheasants, it should be just as lawful to have one to kill wolves or dogs that are being sicked on little black babies. In fact, it's constitutional. Article Number Two of the constitution guarantees the right of every citizen to own a rifle or a shot gun.
Malcolm X
#58. If you don't know what you want to do, it's harder to do it.
Malcolm Forbes
#59. There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.
Malcolm Gladwell
#60. The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.
Malcolm McLaren
#61. America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.
Malcolm X
#62. You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?
Malcolm Gladwell
#64. An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
Malcolm Gladwell
#65. I was wondering if you would like to come over and assist me in going over those photographs." Malcolm said without any preamble. His voice was distracted and distant, and it rankled me.
"I don't know," I told him. "Are you going to stick your tongue in my twat and then run away again?
Ava Lore
#66. Any county's moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women - especially its young women. Wherever ... spiritual values have been submerged, if not destroyed, by an emphasis upon ... material things, invariably the women reflect it.
Malcolm X
#67. My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that's what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me.
Stephen Richards
#68. The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he's within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don't think he'll be by himself.
Malcolm X
#69. If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.
Malcolm X
#70. I believe in a higher power. I've seen and been around people who are very extreme with their faith and pointing fingers and going, "You shouldn't do that because it's a sin against God." It's like, you know what? We're people. We're human beings. We're fallible. We have faults.
Malcolm D. Lee
#71. Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.
Malcolm Bradbury
#72. When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
Malcolm Gladwell
#73. In mixed company women practise a kind of visual shorthand that they later decode in detail in other women's company.
Malcolm De Chazal
#74. Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what's called a divergence test
Malcolm Gladwell
#75. Once I was, yes. But now I have turned my direction away from anything that's racist.
Malcolm X
#76. The Negro's so-called 'revolt' is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!
Malcolm X
#77. Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Malcolm Bradbury
#78. You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get it. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it.
Malcolm X
#79. People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
Malcolm X
#80. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody's guess which of the 'extremes' in approach to the black man's problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first - 'non-violent' Dr. King, or so-called 'violent' me.
Malcolm X
#81. The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.
Janet Malcolm
#82. Sure, Malcolm Turnbull is less anti-science and anti-culture than [Tony] Abbott, but low bar, and there's not a lot to show for it beyond rhetoric.
Justine Larbalestier
#83. I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'
Malcolm X
#84. I saw a picture of Elvis in blue lame, and thought that if I could recreate that suit and walk down the King's Road in it, someone might pick me up and take me off on a crazy adventure.
Malcolm McLaren
#85. The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.
Malcolm X
#86. 'The Big Chill' had a bunch of really talented actors, a great soundtrack, and the college connections that the characters shared. It's one of those movies I glean something different from every time I watch it.
Malcolm D. Lee
#87. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.
He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
Malcolm X
#88. Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.
Malcolm Gladwell
#89. But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.
Malcolm Gladwell
#90. If you want to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior ... you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.
Malcolm Gladwell
#91. One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity.
Malcolm Bradbury
#92. In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner
#93. There's far more truth in the Book of Genesis than in the quantum theory.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#94. He was maxed out. He had no
resources left to do anything else. That's what happens
when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You
start missing things - things that you would pick up on
any other day.
Malcolm Gladwell
#95. The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men's thinking about themselves.
Malcolm X
#96. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
Janet Malcolm
#97. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And
Malcolm Gladwell
#98. Someone has to pay. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay. When a snake bites your children, you don't go and look for the snake that has blood on it's jaws, any old snake will do. Any old snake will do!
Malcolm X
#99. Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.
Malcolm Turnbull
#100. It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.
Malcolm Gladwell
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