Top 100 Quotes About Malcolm X
#1. The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X
#2. 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
#3. The American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing or thinking of himself, as he should, as a part of the non-white peoples of the world.
Malcolm X
#4. New book on Malcolm X says we don't know how he was killed. Want to bring in the FBI. Maybe they were in already.
Mort Sahl
#5. There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
Malcolm X
#6. 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
#7. The only difference between [America] and South Africa, South Africa preaches separation and practices separation, America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference, they don't practice what they preach, whereas South Africa practices and preaches the same thing.
Malcolm X
#8. Our objective is complete freedom, justice and equality by any means necessary.
Malcolm X
#9. Times change so quickly that if you and I don't keep up with the times, we'll find ourselves with an umbrella in our hand, over our head, when the sun is out. Or we'll find ourselves standing in the rain, with the umbrella inside the door.
Malcolm X
#10. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality ...
Malcolm X
#11. 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
#12. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it..
Malcolm X
#13. The junkie can never start to cure himself until he recognizes his true condition.
Malcolm X
#14. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them.
All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.
Malcolm X
#15. A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
Malcolm X
#16. 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
#17. Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them "better," these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.
Malcolm X
#18. Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I'm telling you, kill that dog. I say it if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill that dog. Then you'll put a stop to it.
Malcolm X
#19. Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves.
Malcolm X
#20. Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.
Malcolm X
#21. You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.
Malcolm X
#22. If you blink, you will miss me, but I am in 'Malcolm X.'
Martin Donovan
#23. You can't have capitalism without racism.
Malcolm X
#24. They tell us we are all citizens, that we were born in this country. Well, a cat can have kittens in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits!
Malcolm X
#25. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.
Malcolm X
#26. We black men have a hard enough time in our own struggle for justice, and already have enough enemies as it is, to make the drastic mistake of attacking each other and adding more weight to an already unbearable load.
Malcolm X
#27. 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
#28. A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.
Malcolm X
#29. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
Malcolm X
#30. I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment
Malcolm X
#31. You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.
Malcolm X
#32. I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.
Malcolm X
#33. The rage was in me, and if it wasn't for the rage, then I wouldn't know how to be calm. They feed off of each other. Just like when Malcolm X fed off Martin Luther King. They needed each other.
Gary Sheffield
#34. As bad as I was, as much trouble and worry as I caused my mother, I loved her.
Malcolm X
#36. For me, my 'X' replaced the white slave master name of 'Little' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed on my parental forebears.
Malcolm X
#38. I believe in human rights for everyone, and none of us is qualified to judge each other and that none of us should therefore have that authority.
Malcolm X
#39. 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
#40. We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.
Malcolm X
#41. It is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come
Malcolm X
#42. My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#43. I'm someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can't tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don't know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.
Malcolm Gladwell
#44. Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this too.
Malcolm X
#45. The zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.
Malcolm X
#46. We won't organize any black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have sold us out. Both of them have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party.
Malcolm X
#47. If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.
Malcolm X
#48. 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
#49. It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
Malcolm X
#50. Any time you see someone more successful than you are, they are doing something you aren't.
Malcolm X
#51. A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, they do with crippled minds.
Malcolm X
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.
Malcolm X
#55. New York white youth were killing victims; that was a 'sociological' problem. But when black youth killed somebody, the power structure was looking to hang somebody.
Malcolm X
#56. My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master.
Malcolm X
#57. I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.
Bell Hooks
#58. The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more.
Malcolm X
#59. 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
#60. My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.
Malcolm X
#61. I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
Malcolm X
#62. Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line.
Matthew Quick
#63. My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.
Malcolm X
#64. 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
#65. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man - and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their 'differences' in color.
Malcolm X
#66. 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
#67. Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.
John Henrik Clarke
#68. The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change.
Malcolm X
#69. Of all our studies, it is history that is best qualified to reward our research.
Malcolm X
#70. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.
Malcolm X
#71. We're all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man.
Malcolm X
#72. I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
Malcolm X
#73. Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.
Malcolm X
#74. Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.
Malcolm X
#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. Yes, I'm an extremist. The Black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a Black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.
Malcolm X
#78. They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.
Malcolm X
#79. I Used the Word 'Negro' and I was Firmly Corrected
Malcolm X
#80. Learn to see, listen, and think for yourself.
Malcolm X
#81. 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
#82. People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
Malcolm X
#83. What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people, 'Do they hate him?' That takes a lot of nerve.
Malcolm X
#84. An integrated cup of coffee isn't sufficient pay for four hundred years of slave labor.
Malcolm X
#85. Anything I do today, I regard as urgent.
Malcolm X
#86. There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.
Malcolm X
#87. My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!
Malcolm X
#88. 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
#89. In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.
Malcolm X
#90. I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do.
Malcolm X
#91. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth.
Malcolm X
#92. History proves that the white man is a devil.
Malcolm X
#93. As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.
Malcolm X
#94. The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.
Malcolm X
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. White America is in the minority.
Malcolm X
#98. My feeling about in-laws was that they were outlaws.
Malcolm X
#99. 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
#100. Not one black man is prominent in Brazil. The Negroes there are still at the bottom.
Malcolm X
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