Top 777 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm X - Page 12

Until the white man in America sits down and talks with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won't even know what the race problem - what makes the race problem what it is.

In my recent travels into African countries and others, I was impressed by the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white.

After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming, a bill owed to us that must be collected.

Internal differences within the Nation of Islam forced me out of it. I did not leave of my own free will. But now that it has happened, I intend to make the most of it. Now that I have more independence of action, I intend to use a more flexible approach toward working with others to get a solution to this problem.

There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.

[ Uncle Sam] is not sending 20 billion dollars to South America because he loves those people down here. He's sending it - sending it to them because he needs their friendship, he needs their allegion - their allegiance.

I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim and there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, nothing wrong with the religion of Islam. It just teaches us to believe in Allah as the God.

Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.

America has allowed white people to kill and brutalize those they don't like.

Just as the white man and every other person on this earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of, when it comes to defending himself, black people - we should have the right to defend ourselves also.

God is more lasting than the white man.

You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.

Now the goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who has brutalized them for four hundred years.

I don't know - too much about Robert Williams tactics, but if he was trying to defend himself, he was within his God-given rights and within - and he was also within his natural right, because first law of nature is self-preservation.

America just reaped what it had been sowing.

We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves... One can't unite bananas with scattered leaves.

Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them despitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of attack that Uncle Tom did on the plantation to keep those Negroes defenseless in the face of the attack of the Klan in that day.

Because The Honorable Elijah Muhammad makes black people brave enough, men enough to defend ourselves no matter what the odds are, the white man runs around here with a doctrine that Mr. Muhammad is advocating the violence when he is actually telling Negroes to defend themselves against violent people.

Better jobs and housing are only temporary solutions. They are aspects of tokenism and don't go to the heart of the problem.

There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.

Whereas the only real solution to the race problem in this country is a solution that involves individual self improvement and collective self improvement in, whereas our own, wherein our own people are concerned.

Instead of the Negro leaders having the black man begging for a chance to - to dine in white restaurants, the Negro leader should be showing the black man how to do something to strengthen his own economy.

I'm not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it.

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate.

We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don't feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D.C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it.

Solve the race problem here, and once you solve the race problem here, you don't have to send these billions of dollars abroad.

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

Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!

I'm with an old family" was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them.

... the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.

[Black nationalism] is not designed to make the black man reevaluate the white man--you know him already--but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don't change the white man's mind; you can't change his mind. And that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America--America's conscience is bankrupt.

Much of what I say might sound like it's stirring up trouble, but it's the truth!

Moses tried to separate his people from Pharaoh, and when he tried, the magicians tried to fool the people into staying with the Pharaoh, and we look upon these other organizations that are trying to get Negroes to integrate with this doomed white man as nothing but modern-day magicians, and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad is a modern-day Moses trying to separate us from the modern-day Pharaoh.

There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call 'em "chitt'lin'" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That's what you were -- a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.

If the government can't get the black man justice, then it's time for the black man to get some justice for himself.

The only way the two can have equal job opportunities is if black people have factories as, as well as white people have factories.

You don't do anything to further your stay aboard a ship that you see is going to go down to the bottom of the ocean.

God is about to eliminate the white man from this earth.

Let's cool it, brothers.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

America is subsidizing what is left of the prestige and strength of the once mighty Britain. The sun has set forever on that monocled, pith-helmeted resident colonialist, sipping tea with his delicate lady in the non-white colonies being systematically robbed of every valuable resource. Britain's superfluous royalty and nobility now exist by charging tourists to inspect the once baronial castles, and by selling memoirs, perfumes, autographs, titles, and even themselves.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job

If Christianity had asserted itself in Germany, six million Jews would have lived.

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being - neither white, black, brown, or red.

Soon now, as the Negro awakens a little more and sees the vise that he's in, sees the bag that he's in, sees the real game that he's in, then the Negro's going to develop a new tactic.

Let's cool it brothers . . . Spoken to his assassins, three men who stabbed him 16 times.

The Negro's so-called 'revolt' is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!

Most of the, or I should say many of the negro leaders actually suffer themselves from an inferiority complex even though they say they don't.

First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us".

The goal of Martin Luther King is to get the Negroes to forgive the people the people who have brutalized them for four hundred years, by lulling them to sleep and making them forget what those whites have done to them, but the masses of black people today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.

Martin Luther King has taken away from the Negro his Gov-given right to defend himself.

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.

After you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

I had blind faith in him. My faith in Elijah Muhammad was more blind and more uncompromising than any faith that any man has ever had for another man. And so I didn't try and see him as he actually was.

My faith in God is such that I am not afraid.