Quotes from Malcolm X

A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.

In my 39 years on this earth, the Holy city of Makka had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of all and felt like a complete human being

America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.

The mental flexibility of the wise man permits him to keep an open mind and enables him to readjust himself whenever it becomes necessary for a change.

How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours?

We're all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man.

The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men's thinking about themselves.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what's already yours?

I don't advocate violence; but if a man steps on my toes, I'll step on his.

The only possible way out for the white man is to give us Negroes some land of our own; let us get out, get away from his wicked reign and go for ourselves.

A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire, or preserve his freedom.

In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.

Like Samson, I am ready to pull down the white man's temple, knowing full well that I will be destroyed by the falling rubble.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that we should be separate, all right, but in this separate state or separate existence, the black man should be given the opportunity and the incentive to do for himself what the white man has done for himself.

Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.

I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.

Anytime you tell a man to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent in the face of a violent enemy, you're making that man defenseless. You're robbing him of his God-given right to defend himself.

Those who would hunt a man need to remember that a jungle also contains those who hunt the hunters.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.

When the Muslims deliver the indictment of the American system, it is not the white man per se that is being doomed.

God is going to punish the white man for his misdeeds toward black people.

It has taken us that long to get the deaf, dumb, and blind black men in the wilderness of North America to wake up and understand who they are.