Malcolm X
Activist
1925-05-19 – 1965-02-21
American civil rights leader and Black nationalist who became a prominent spokesperson for the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and early 1960s. After leaving the organization, he founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was assassinated in New York City in 1965.
Books by Malcolm X
-
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
View on Amazon -
-
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Quotes by Malcolm X
-
Many people in this country who want to see us the minority, and who don't want to see us taking too militant or too uncompromising a stand, are absolutely against the successful regrouping or organising of any faction in this country whose thought and whose thinking pattern is international rather than national There's a world wide revolution going on, it goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama, it goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then, what power structure? An international Western power structure.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
Read quote -
But let's not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti-Semite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn't 't pat him on the back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti-Semite.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.
Read quote -
History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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 follows to keep up.
Read quote -
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man's heaven! The miracle is that the white man's puppet Negro —leaders', his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.
Read quote -
Never ask a woman about other men.Either she'll tell you a lie, and you still won't know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.
Read quote -
Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there.The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail. She had finished high school, but by then she was already going the wrong way.Defying her grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor.This led to dope, and that to selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian. One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this.To have treated her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy.The only excuse I can offer is that like so many of my black brothers today, I was just deaf, dumb, and blind.
Read quote -
... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.
Read quote -
You are either free or not free
Read quote -
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...
Read quote -
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
Read quote -
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.
Read quote