Top 777 Quotes & Sayings by Malcolm X - Page 13

That value system has been handed right down in European society. And today when you find Negroes, if they even look like they're adopting these so-called middle-class values, standards, it's not that they are taking something from the white man, but they are probably identifying again with the level or standard that these same whites have gotten from them back during that period.

I have read where Abraham Lincoln said he wasn't interested in freeing the slaves.

The Negro neighborhood, which is inferior, is begging for a chance to - integrate itself into that which is - is superior, which is not going to happen. It's going to cause trouble.

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.

Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

To say it is not practical, one has to also admit that integration is not practical.

That's where Dr. [Martin Luther] King is mixed up. His goals should be the solution of the problem of the black man in America.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that the way to solve this problem is for the white man to give us some territory of our own. And then our people - we have technical know-how, we have agricultural know-how. We have been working for the white man in his business. In every phase of his government we work.

There has to be something wrong when a man or a woman leaves his own people and marries somebody of another kind.

I think that the negro should reserve the right to execute.

The goal - is the dignity of the black man in America. He wants respect as the human being. He wants recognition as a human being.

The white man is going to keep you integration-minded Negroes cooped up here in America, and when you discover that the white man is a trickster, a devil, that he has no intentions of integrating, then you Negroes will run wild.

I have never seen white people who would sit, who would, who would approach a solution to their own problems nonviolently or passively. It's only when they are so-called "fighting for the rights of Negroes" that they nonviolently, passively, and lovingly, you know, approach the situation.

At the same time Reverend Galamison policy is intelligent enough where he can't be used to attack me.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

We don't think that we're begging for anything. We think we're demanding what is ours by right.

Once the white man let the Negro get an education, the Negro began to want what the white man has. But he let Negroes get an education and now they are demanding integration; they want to have exactly what he has. And the white man is not going to give it to them!

It has been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South are in integrated schools. That isn't integration, that's tokenism!

I mean a real police state just to get a token recognition of a law. It take, it took, I think, 15,000 troops and 6 million dollars to put one negro in the University of Mississippi. That's a police action, police state action.

The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.

Any form of integration, forced integration, any - any - any effort to force integration upon whites is actually hypocritical.

Jews who have been guilty of exploiting the black people in America, economically, civically, and otherwise, hide behind - hide their guilt by accusing The Honorable Elijah Muhammad of being anti-Semitic, simply because he teaches our people to go into business for ourselves and take over the economic leadership in our own community.

A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, they do with crippled minds.

The 22 million or 30 million, whatever the case may be, Afro-Americans in the United States were still Africans.

The law of nature gives a man the right to defend himself when he's attacked. And God's law itself gives a man the right to defend himself when he's attacked.

I think that if Essien Udom had something he didn't take it back far enough in history to get at the proper understanding of it.

We believe in one God. We believe Muhammad is the Apostle of God.

More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society.

Since integration is so slow, and the white man knows the problem must be solved, the only thing that he can do tomorrow is, is separate, because we're already separated.

It's easy. [Black man] is - he's separate already. The fact that you have Harlem, the fact that you have the Negro ghetto and the so-called Negro slum, he's already separate.

If you have an all-white neighborhood you don't call it a segregated neighborhood. But you call an all-black neighborhood a segregated neighborhood. And why? Because the segregated neighborhood is the one that's controlled by the ou - from the outside by others, but a separate neighborhood is a neighborhood that is independent, it's equal, it can do - it can stand on its own two feet, such as the neighborhood. It's an independent, free neighborhood, free community.

Instead of working for white man and helping him hold up a government that continues to suppress us socially and, and exploit us economically and oppress us politically, let us go and enter our own territory and use our own talents to uplift ourselves by our own bootstraps. And then he will recognize us for what we are.

When the snakes out in that field begin to realize that if one of their members get out of line, it's going to be detrimental to all of them, they'll keep that, perhaps they'll then take the necessary steps to keep their fellow snakes away from my chickens or away from my children if the responsibility is placed upon them.

If a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood.

Now the white man's time is over. Tokenism will not help him, and it will doom us. Complete separation will save us - and who knows, it might make God decide to give the white devil a few more years.

The white press itself created civil right leaders.

The white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.

Even after the child, the life of the black child was saved, but that same white man will have to toss him right back into the discriminate, into discrimination, segregation, and these other things.

If the various groups in America had been less selfish and had permitted different representatives from the groups to travel into foreign countries, and broaden their own scope, and come back and educate the movements they represented, not only would this have made the groups to which they belonged more enlightened and more worldly in the international sense, but it also would have given the independent African states abroad a better understanding of the groups in the United States, and what they stand for, what they represent.

If I go home and someone, and my child has blood running down her leg and someone tells me that a snake bit her, I'm going out and kill the snake. And when I find the snake, I'm not going to look and see if he has blood on his jaws.

The government has departments to deal with the special interest groups that make themselves heard and felt. A Department of Agriculture cares for the farmers' needs. There is a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There is a Department of the Interior - in which the Indians are included. Is the farmer, the doctor, the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No - it is the black man! There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

Here was one of the white man's most characteristic behavior patterns - where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don't share his vainglorious self-opinion.

The only minority in America that's asking for integration is the so-called Negro, primarily because he is inferior, not inherently inferior, but he's economically, socially, politically inferior.

Most of these other negro leaders who are supposedly integrationists aren't that intelligent [like Reverend Galamison].

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says number one, [Negro] must know - have a knowledge of himself. And this gives him confidence in himself. He - he has been brainwashed by the educational system that exists here in America to the point where he feels he was a savage in the jungle when he was - before he was brought here. And this destroys his morale.

10 years ago the black man knew what his condition was. And today, because of the world revolution that's taking place all over this earth, the black man would be fighting for what he knows is his by right, but the movement on the part of [Martin Luther] King and the others had done nothing but slow down the militancy that is inherent in the nature of the black man.

In Harlem, for instance, all of the stores are owned by white people, all of the buildings are owned by white people. The black people are just there - paying rent, buying the groceries; but they don't own the stores, clothing stores, food stores, any kind of stores; don't even own the homes that they live in. They are all owned by outsiders, and for these run-down apartment dwellings, the black man in Harlem pays more money than the man down in the rich Park Avenue section.

We may disagree on methods [with Martin Luther King], but we don't have to argue all day on methods.

We're primarily interested in solving the problem of 20 million black people. And if integration is going to solve the problem tomorrow, then let's integrate. But since the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision seven years ago, and you only have about six or seven percent integration now, on an educational level, that means that the black man trying to use integration as a means of solving his problem will be another 100 years just getting integration on an educational level.

You know, if ever there was a people who should know how to practice brotherhood, it is the American Negro and it is the people of Egypt.

No black person married to a white person can speak for me!

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for the white man to destroy all Black Muslims.

If I may add, for instance, [Martin Luther] King and these others will say that they are fighting for the Negro to have equal job opportunity. How can people, a group of people, such as our people, who own no factories, have equal job opportunities competing against the race that owns the factories?The only way the two can have equal job opportunities is if black people have factories as, as well as white people have factories.

The Negro is nothing but an ex-slave who is now trying to get himself integrated into the slave master's house.