Quotes from Malcolm X

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

I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was. 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 fused into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school drop-outs are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did. And they inevitably move into more and more, worse and worse, illegality and immorality.

I have less patience with someone who doesn't wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. [...] In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines succes or failure.

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 the next time.

A few days later, however, he wrote in one of his memo books this, which he let me read, "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.

Do you know why the white man really hates you? It's because every time he sees your face, he sees a mirror of his crime—and his guilty conscience can't bear to face it!

If I weren't out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading.

I]t's a reaction that was produced by the society; and I think that it is the society that produced this that should be attacked, not the reaction that develops[.]

John Viscount Morley.

That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them.

I feel that if white people were attacked by Negroes—if the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate, or reluctant to protect those whites from those Negroes—then those white people should protect and defend themselves from those Negroes, using arms if necessary. And I feel that when the law fails to protect Negroes from whites' attack, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.

The American white man has so thoroughly brainwashed the black man to see himself as only a domestic "civil rights" problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the Negro sees that the struggle of the American black man is international.

I was a zombie then—like all Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march.

the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's non-white man.

CHAPTER 7 HUSTLER

I was to learn later that Elijah Muhammad's tales, like this one of "Yacub," infuriated the Muslims of the East. While at Mecca, I reminded them that it was their fault, since they themselves hadn't done enough to make real Islam known in the West. Their silence left a vacuum into which any religious faker could step and mislead our people.

He had only one eye. How he had lost the other one I have never known.

Aside from the basic African dialects, I would try to learn Chinese, because it looks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future.

My whole life had been a chronology of -- changes .

I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity -- because you can hardly mention anything I'm not curious about.

I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their 'differences' in color.

We cannot teach what we do not know and we cannot lead where we will not go.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called 'Christian' white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem.