Quotes from Malcolm X

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.

This is still one of the black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called "upper class" Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are "different from those others" that they can't see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.

My black brothers and sisters—no one will know who we are…until we know who we are! We never will be able to go anywhere until we know where we are!

I could spend the rest of my life reading, just to satisfy my curiosity

Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man's America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to prove that the black man is nothing.

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.

Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created.

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?

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 could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

Malcolm believed, by the way, in Student Power: not only did he feel that the college-educated black, if he could retain (as he must) his sense of reality and history, and refrain from being absorbed into the white world by its material enticements, was obviously better equipped to cope with the problems besetting his people in America, but he also believed, or hoped, that the white college student was more receptive to change than were his parents.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form—I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate." He

America's racism is among their own fellow whites. That's where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

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!

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 the 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!

I have wife who understands, or even if she doesn't she at least pretends.

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the I.R.S. all combined can't turn up a thing I got, beyond a car to drive and a seven-room house to live in.

If it is all right for black people to be drafted and sent to Korea or South Vietnam or Laos or Berlin or someplace else to fight and die for the white man, then there is nothing wrong with that same black man doing the same thing when he is under the brutality in this country at the hands of the white man.

I hadn't hustled in the streets for years for nothing. I knew when I was being set up.

One day, may we all meet together in the light of understanding

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." Largely

I've often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black.

Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism, until they face some test, and then their racism emerges in one form or other.