Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.
American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color differences. And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor could truly live like human beings... The white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
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.
No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
It is the process of mis-education that inhibits the full potential of a nation.
Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice – which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency – that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.
It’s a crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men both. Little innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no history. Little black children seeing, before they could talk, that their parents considered themselves inferior. Innocent black children growing up, living out their lives, dying of old age – and all of their lives ashamed of being black. But the truth is pouring out of the bag now.
Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is – and that’s in their own home communities; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work. Aside.
If something is yours by right, then fight for it or shut up.
If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity – because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.
Let’s just face truth. Facts! Whether or not the white man of the world is able to face truth, and facts, about the true reasons for his troubles – that’s what essentially will determine whether or not he will now survive.
Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your – your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.
Mankind’s history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual.
No man in our time aroused fear and hatred in the white man as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price – a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.
Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn’t the American black man fight to be a human being?
In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.
Do nothing unto anyone that you would not like to have done unto yourself. Seek peace, and never be the aggressor – but if anyone attacks you, we do not teach you to turn the other cheek.
I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.
All of us – who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries – were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.
The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying.