Quotes from Malcolm X

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression.

You have to have a license. But there are only certain seasons that you can kill that animal. But you don't need a license to kill a Negro and you can shoot one out of season—anytime—and you won't get any time.

All I had was to improve on their strategy [...] 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.

Now then, you have the masses of black people in this country who are the offshoot of the field Negro, during slavery. They are the masses. They are the ones who are jobless. They are the last hired and the first fired.

But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come. [...] each day I live as if I am already dead.

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.

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 is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have assigned themselves to failure.

I knew that Malcolm X had an almost fanatical obsession about time. I have less patience with someone who doesn't wear a watch than with anyone else , for this type is not time-conscious, he had once told me.

I got on top of a car and began waving my arms and yelling at them to quiet down. They did quiet down, and then I asked them to disperse - and they did.

For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I knew how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading 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. I

Anytime you see someone more succesful than you are, the are doing something you aren't

Se você enfia uma faca de 20cm em minhas costas e puxa 10cm para fora, isso não é progresso. Se você puxa-la inteira para fora, ainda não seria progresso. O progresso é curar a ferida que o golpe fez. Ainda nem começaram a remover a faca. Eles nem admitem que a faca está lá

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

I think the single worst mistake of the American black organizations, and their leaders, is that they have failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication between the independent nations of Africa and the American black people.

It is the merit of European political scientists and sociologists to give a high priority to the power of ideas in a social struggle. 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.

He believed, as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin.

She threatened a Negro man who worked for her father that if he didn't take (have sex with) her she would swear he tried rape. He had no choice, except that he quit working for them. And from then until she finished high school, she managed it several times with other Negroes

Why, here in America, the seeds of racism are so deeply rooted in the white people collectively, their belief that they are 'superior' in some way is so deeply rooted, that these things are in the national white subconsciousness. Many whites are even actually unaware of their own racism, until they face some test, and then their racism emerges in one form or another.

Revolutions are fought to get control of land, to remove the absentee landlord and gain control of the land and the institutions that flow from that land.

It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.

I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when—soon now, in prison—I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival-and in that kind of a community, survival is what is respected.