Quotes About Malcolm X

I'd been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.

At 16, I went to Smith College in Massachusetts and that was right after the peak of the civil-rights movement and all the rest. It was an era when students were making demands and many black students were closer to the teachings of Malcolm X, or what they thought were his teachings.

The black nation of Egypt is the only country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology

The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.

He said he wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin's proposals after hearing him (Malcolm X).

My mom was big on education, big on reading, so she was always pushing books on me: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' like, 'Read these books.' And it was like, man, I'm learning stuff that I just can't get anywhere else.

I'm going to have to call up Spike Lee. I did a cameo for him in 'Malcolm X,' and I'm trying to get him to do my life story and the history of the Black Panther Party.

I had seen 'Do the Right Thing' when I was at college, and it was incredibly inspiring as a piece of cinema. Just brilliant, I thought. But saw 'Malcolm X' with a crowded audience. It was my first time in an American cinema, hearing an audience respond. You know, in England, everyone is so restrained.

Malcolm X raised my consciousness about myself and my people and other people more than any person I know. I knew him before he became Malcolm X.

This is the thing you need to spread the word about among our people wherever you go. Never let them be brainwashed into thinking that whenever they take steps to see that they're in a position to defend themselves that they;re being unlawful. The only time you're being unlawful is when you break the law. It's LAWFUL to have something to DEFEND yourself.

Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

The greatest single reason for [the] Christian church's failure . . . is its failure to combat racism.

No man in our time aroused fear and hatred in the white man as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price—a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.

I had heard for years of Muslim hospitality, but one couldn't quite imagine such warmth.

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.

Malcolm X looked at me hard. 'A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.' I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can't quite conceive him dead. It still feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians. New York, 1965

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?

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.

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.

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.

it was chiefly the women who weren't prostitutes who taught me to be very distrustful of most women; there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than the prostitutes have for pay. And I am talking about both black and white.

As testimony to the power of redemption and the force of human personality, the autobiography of Malcolm X is a revelation.

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[.]

I asked him was three hundred and sixty degrees, then, the maximum of degrees in anything? He said "Yes." I said, "Well, why is it that Masons go only to thirty-three degrees?" He had no satisfactory answer. But for me, the answer was that Masonry, actually, is only thirty-three degrees of the religion of Islam, which is the full projection, forever denied to Masons, although they know it exists.