Quotes by Malcolm X

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

I am a Muslim, because its a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.

True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.

There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.

I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I havent done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hoursbecause the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white mans society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

When the meat platter was passed to me, I didnt even know what the meat was; usually, you couldnt tell, anyway-but it was suddenly as though _dont eat any more pork_ flashed on a screen before me.I hesitated, with the platter in mid-air; then I passed it along to the inmate waiting next to me. He began serving himself; abruptly, he stopped. I remember him turning, looking surprised at me.I said to him, I dont eat pork.The platter then kept on down the table.It was the funniest thing, the reaction, and the way that it spread. In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didnt eat pork.

And when I speak, I dont speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of Americas so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all weve seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We dont see any American dream. Weve experienced only the American nightmare.

To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace

A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. Thats equality. If the United States government doesnt want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists. If they dont want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they dont want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Dont teach us non-violence!!!

You cant hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

You cant have capitalism without racism.

Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. If you want it light, you want it weak, integrated with white milk. Just like these Negroes who weaken themselves and their race by this integrating and intermixing with whites. If you want bread with no nutritional value, you ask for white bread. All the good that was in it has been bleached out of it, and it will constipate you. If you want pure flour, you ask for dark flour, whole-wheat flour. If you want pure sugar, you want dark sugar.

A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.

No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.

Americas racism is among their own fellow whites. Thats where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading 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. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

The Algerians were revolutionsists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with Fance, they wanted some land, not some France.

Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They took her to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. My mother remained in the same hospital at Kalamazoo for about 26 years.My last visit, when I knew I would never come to see her again-there-was in 1952. I was twenty-seven. My brother Philbert had told me that on his last visit, she had recognized him somewhat. In spots he said.But she didnt recognize me at all.She stared at me. She didnt know who I was.Her mind, when I tried to talk, to reach her, was somewhere else. I asked, Mama, do you know what day it is?She said, staring, All the people have gone.I cant describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didnt know me.It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers.-Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X