"You can't hate the roots of a..." - Quote by Malcolm X
You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself.
More by Malcolm X
“I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need.”
“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back. She didn't go and bomb - she bombed any part of Japan. She dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Those people in Hiroshima probably hadn't even, some of them; most of them hadn't even killed anybody.”
“I think as an intelligent person you would agree that when you are teaching among oppressed people that they should be relieved of their oppression not 100 or 10 years from now, but right now, you're going to find your talk is going to fall upon sympathetic ears.”
More on Identity
“The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.”
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
“I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.”
More on Self Hatred
“I hate myself, and I want to die”
“For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.”
“I think teaching a man to hate himself is much more criminal than teaching a man to hate someone else.”