Malcolm X Quotes

“That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice.”

“[Negro] should realize that he is living in a war zone, and he is at war with an enemy that is as vicious and criminal and inhuman as any war-making country has ever been.”

“Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you'll never know where you'll get an idea from.”

“Many of them who belong to these countries that were former colonial powers have racist attitudes, but their racist attitude is never displayed to the degree that the America's attitude of racism is displayed. Never.”

“I want to be remembered as someone who was sincere. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I was wrong, I was wrong in sincerity.”

“History is not hatred.”

“Once I was, yes. But now I have turned my direction away from anything that's racist.”

“We would do the same thing that America did when the Jap[an] - when, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. America defended itself. They said praise the Lord, but they passed the ammunition.”

“Now, you integration-minded Negroes are trying to force yourselves on your former slave master, trying to make him accept you in his drawing room; you want to hang out with his women rather than the women of your own kind.”

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

“You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.”

“Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.”

“My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.”

“So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have — and that is fear. I know some of you are afraid to listen to the truth — you have been raised on fear and lies. But I am going to preach to you the truth until you are free of that fear...”

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

“No sane black man really wants integration! No sane white man really wants integration!”

“Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle.”

“That's not our problem, that's America's problem. If the average American knew the trouble that Uncle Sam is in all over this earth, they could see that it - we are closer toward getting a separate territory in this country than the integrationists are toward getting integration.”

“To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or a hen not to cackle.”

“A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.”

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”

“Never allow your enemies to educate your children.”

“The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.”

“How can a Negro say America is his nation? He was brought here in chains; he was put in slavery an worked like a mule for three hundred years; he was separated from his land, his culture, his God, his language!”

“Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!”