Malcolm X was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement. As one of the greatest, most influential African Americans in history, famous Malcolm X quotes will empower you to live up to your full potential.
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Best Malcolm X Quotes
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 next time.
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
My alma mater was books, a good library I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day.
Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves.
In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I never will be guilty of that again as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites made blanket indictments against blacks.
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.
In all my years in the streets, I’d been looking at the exploitation that for the first time I really saw and understood.
Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.
I reflected many, many times to myself upon how the American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing or thinking of himself, as he should, as a part of the nonwhite peoples of the world.
Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.
It isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.
All of us who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.
Hence 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.
When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.
I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.
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.
When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire or preserve his freedom
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things.
I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is and that’s in their own home communities.
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it
People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.
You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
I don’t care how nice one is to you, the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has 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’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. I for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.
And that was how, after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.
After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.
It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.
True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.
My alma mater was books, a good library I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.
A race of people is like an 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.
The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying
Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.
We’re not Americans, we’re Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. That rock landed on us.
You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
By making our people in the Western Hemisphere hate Africa, we ended up hating ourselves. We hated our African characteristics. We hated our African identity. We hated our African features. So much so that you would find those of us in the West who would hate the shape of our nose. We would hate the shape of our lips. We would hate the color of our skin and the texture of our hair. This was a reaction, but we didn’t realize that it was a reaction.
Dr. King wants the same thing I want. Freedom. Malcolm X
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Malcolm X
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man. Malcolm X
Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!
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 Malcom X
Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.
If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary. Malcolm X
People involved in a revolution don’t become part of the system; they destroy the system The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them
The thing that you have to understand about those of us in the Black Muslim movement was that all of us believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. We believed in him. We actually believed that God, in Detroit by the way, that God had taught him and all of that. I always believed that he believed in himself. And I was shocked when I found out that he himself didn’t believe it. Malcolm X
Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.
You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being. Malcolm X
We black men have a hard enough time in our own struggle for justice, and already have enough enemies as it is, to make the drastic mistake of attacking each other and adding more weight to an already unbearable load.
History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals. Malcolm X
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. Malcolm X
A new world order is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves that we may take our rightful place in it.
How can anyone be against love? 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.
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else. Malcolm X
Early in life I learned that if you want something, you better make some noise.
Change is only a good thing if you change in a good way. Malcolm X
If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves. Malcolm X
A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else’s control. I feel that what I’m thinking and saying is now for myself. Malcolm X
In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
I don’t advocate violence; but if a man steps on my toes, I’ll step on his
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it. Malcolm X
A race of people is like an 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.
Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change. Malcolm X
People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.
I came here to tell the truth and if the truth condemns America, then she stands condemned! Malcolm X
If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.
Truth does not change, only our awareness of it. Malcolm X
Black people are fed up with the dillydallying, pussyfooting, compromising approach that we’ve been using toward getting our freedom. We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying We Shall Overcome We’ve got to fight until we overcome.
Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today. Malcolm X
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn the other cheek and heaven for you after you die philosophy!
History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals. Malcolm X
I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.
Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world. Malcolm X
Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.
I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color. Malcolm X
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves. Malcolm X
It takes heart to be a guerrilla warrior because you’re on your own. In conventional warfare you have tanks and a whole lot of other people with you to back you up planes over your head and all that kind of stuff. But a guerrilla is on his own. All you have is a rifle, some sneakers and a bowl of rice, and that’s all you need and a lot of heart.
In any organization, someone must be the boss. If it’s even just one person, you’ve got to be the boss of yourself. Malcolm X
If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success.
If something is yours by right, then fight for it or shut up. Malcolm X
You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. Malcolm X
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