Quotes from Malcolm X

Is it clear why I have said that the American white man's malignant superiority complex has done him more harm than an invading army?

His views about the white man were devastating, but at no time did he transgress against my own personality and make me feel that I, as an individual, shared in the guilt. He attributed the degradation of the Negro people to the white man. He denounced integration as a fraud. He contended that if the leaders of the established civil rights organizations persisted, the social struggle would end in bloodshed because he was certain the white man would never concede full integration.

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.

I'm handing them the American passport which signifies the exact opposite of what Islam stands for.

the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much.

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?' The white man is in no moral _position_ to accuse anyone else of hate!

I knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of my life.

If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.

They used as a reason for my transfer [from one prison to another] that I refused to take some kind of shots, an innoculation or something.

Elijah Muhammad spoke of how the black man was Original Man, who had been kidnapped from his homeland and stripped of his language, his culture, his family structure, his family name, until the black man in America did not even realize who he was.

This is what police always do in cases of police brutality. They brutalize the black man and then turn around and charge the black man with attacking them.

That's when Mr. Muhammad's patience wore thin. And with his nod, I began returning their fire.

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.

My reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided to do this by putting my name down to debate.

To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything

The white man's system has been imposed upon non-white peoples all over the world.

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.

My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my 'X.' The Muslim's 'X' symbolized the true African family name that he could never know. For me, my X replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little,' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal fore-bearers. The receipt of my X meant that forever after in the nation of Islam I would be known as Malcolm X.

I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

Instead, both heaven and hell were conditions in which people lived right here on this planet Earth. Mr. Fard taught that the black person in America had been for 400 years in hell, and he, Mr. Fard, had come to return them to where heaven for them was--back home, among their own kind.

This was my first lesson about gambling: fi you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating.

I'll explain it this way, sir. If some men are in a car, driving with a destination in mind, and you know they are going the wrong way, but they are convinced they are going the right way, then you get into the car with them, and ride with them, talking-and finally when they see they are on the wrong road, not getting where they were intending, then you tell them, and they will listen to you then, what road to take.

I simply refused to believe.