Malcolm X was a prominent African American leader and activist who spoke out against racism and injustice. His words were often powerful and inspiring, and they continue to resonate today.
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| You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom. ― Malcolm X |
Malcolm X quotes are a powerful reminder of the importance of fighting for justice and equality. They are also a testament to his courage and conviction. His words continue to inspire people around the world to stand up for what they believe in.
Here is a collection of Malcolm X most famous quotes: Malcolm X quotes about equality, respect, justice, freedom, history, politics, revolution, violence, peace and life. Malcolm X quotes about Martin Luther King. Quotes and sayings on future, education, books, reading, action, knowledge, understanding and leadership by Malcolm X.
Malcolm X Quotes and Sayings
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.
My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.
Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.
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| My alma mater was books, a good library, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. ― Malcolm X |
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.
The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.
Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.
Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley.
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
If you're not ready to die for it, take the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.
There is nothing in our book, the Qur'an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.
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| Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. ― Malcolm X |
The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba - yes Cuba too.
We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.
The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.
Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.
It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'
I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin.
A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man.
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.
I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.
How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?
In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That.... was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about 'white men.'
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| There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time. ― Malcolm X |
It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.
You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.
You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.... No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I am concerned, as long as it is not shown to everyone of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me.
I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land-every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike-all snored in the same language.
I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.
One day, may we all meet together in the light of understanding.
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.
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.
It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.
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| You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. ― Malcolm X |
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.
America preaches integration and practices segregation.
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.
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
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.
America is the first country.... that can actually have a bloodless revolution.
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being – neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.
And just because you have colleges and universities doesn't mean you have education.
Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.
I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca.
This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.
You can't have capitalism without racism.
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.
Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.
Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you'll never know where you'll get an idea from.
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| If you have no critics you'll likely have no success. ― Malcolm X |
I'm a man who believes that I died 20 years ago. And I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.
They cripple the bird's wing, and then condemn it for not flying as fast as they.
I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.
Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business - you know they're doing something that you aren't.
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
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.
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
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.
I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.
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.
If you are in a country that is progressive, the woman is progressive. If you're in a country that reflects the consciousness toward the importance of education, it's because the woman is aware of the importance of education. But in every backward country you'll find the women are backward, and in every country where education is not stressed its because the women don't have education.
The young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.
The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'
You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.
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| If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything. ― Malcolm X |
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
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.
Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power.
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.
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.
The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.
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.
There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time.
The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.
True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.
I saw all races, all colors, blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists, no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words.
If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.
All I held against Jews was that so many Jews actually were hypocrites in their claim to be friends of the American black man.
Truth does not change, only our awareness of it.
I Used the Word 'Negro' and I was Firmly Corrected.
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| People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book. ― Malcolm X |
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.
Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.
It is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come.
My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.
I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.
If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.
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.
America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
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.
We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us.
I don't advocate violence; but if a man steps on my toes, I'll step on his.
I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.
The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity - because you can hardly mention anything I am not curious about.
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| A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man. ― Malcolm X |
Tell him that he and all of the other moderate Negroes who are getting somewhere need to always remember that it was us extremists who made it possible.
When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.
You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.
I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.
Even Samson, the world's strongest man, was destroyed by the woman who slept in his arms. she was the one whose words hurt him.
You have to realize that up until about 1959, Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected Africa always in a negative light - jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized.
An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books."
To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or a hen not to cackle.
A man curses because he doesn't have the words to say what's on his mind.
We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.
A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
You are either free or not free.
History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.
Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.
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| Truth is on the side of the oppressed. ― Malcolm X |
Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn't the American black man fight to be a human being?
I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Do nothing unto anyone that you would not like to have done unto yourself. Seek peace, and never be the aggressor—but if anyone attacks you, we do not teach you to turn the other cheek.
Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.
All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.
I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.
The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying.
The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.
He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his followers to keep up.
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.
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
I came here to tell the truth - and if the truth condemns America, then she stands condemned!
How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?
We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.
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| The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. ― Malcolm X |
I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then as I still expect today.
Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. But separation is that which is done voluntarily, by two equals―for the good of both.
Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice―which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency―that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.
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.
And concerning anything in this society involved in helping Negroes, the federal government shows an inability to function. But it can function in South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Berlin, and in other places where it has no business. But it can't function in Mississippi.
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.
You don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy. And you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.
Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.
The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.
You cannot separate peace and freedom. Because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
These negroes aren't asking for no nation. They wanna crawl back on the plantation.
Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual.
Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?
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| We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. ― Malcolm X |
Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them 'better,' these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.
Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are citizen, you are free; if you're not a citizen you are a slave.
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound.
If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
It showed me how any country's moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women—especially its young women.
This is why I say it's the ballot or the bullet. It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.
I had heard for years of Muslim hospitality, but one couldn't quite imagine such warmth.
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!
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
Whether you use bullets or ballots, you've got to aim well; don't strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.
No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me, as long as that same respect and recognition isn't shown towards everyone of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me.
It is the process of mis-education that inhibits the full potential of a nation.
If ballots won't work, bullets will.
Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten, not for one second.
For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?'
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| Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. ― Malcolm X |
But people are always speculating—why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever hap-pened to us is an ingredient.
You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.
There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.
When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eye so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!
In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I'd put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he's motivated, in prison he can change his life.
Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together.
If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about.
In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.
If you are born in America with a black skin, you're in prison.
If something is yours by right, then fight for it or shut up.