Quotes from Malcolm X

I simply refused to believe.

All I had was to improve on their strategy [...] anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business—you know they're doing something that you aren't.

I got on top of a car and began waving my arms and yelling at them to quiet down. They did quiet down, and then I asked them to disperse - and they did.

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

It is the merit of European political scientists and sociologists to give a high priority to the power of ideas in a social struggle. 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.

He believed, as did Marcus Garvey, that freedom, independence and self-respect could never be achieved by the Negro in America, and that therefore the Negro should leave America to the white man and return to his African land of origin.

She threatened a Negro man who worked for her father that if he didn't take (have sex with) her she would swear he tried rape. He had no choice, except that he quit working for them. And from then until she finished high school, she managed it several times with other Negroes

I have learned to hate every drop of white rapist blood that is in me

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 followers to Keep up.

I could tell the impact of this upon them. They had been aware that the plight of the black man in America was bad, but they had not been aware that it was inhuman, that it was psychological castration.

I have since learned—helping me to understand what then began to happen within me—that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees; they didn't feel they needed any help.

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.