Quotes by Malcolm X

Time is on the side of the oppressed today, its against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, its against the oppressor. You dont need anything else.

It has hindered where it might have helped; it has been evasive when it was morally bound to be forthright; it has separated believers on the basis of color, although it has declared its mission to be a universal brotherhood under Jesus Christ. Christian love is the white mans love for himself and for his race.

Dont be in a hurry to condemn because he doesnt do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didnt know what you know today.

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isnt gambling, hes cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.

My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so safe, and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.

We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.

I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I dont think it will be based on the color of the skin...

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

You are either free or not free

Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there.The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail. She had finished high school, but by then she was already going the wrong way.Defying her grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor.This led to dope, and that to selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian. One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this.To have treated her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy.The only excuse I can offer is that like so many of my black brothers today, I was just deaf, dumb, and blind.

Never ask a woman about other men.Either shell tell you a lie, and you still wont know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.

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! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’, his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.

He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his follows to keep up.

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.