Quotes from Malcolm X

told Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.

I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials

Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made....

And this is true; this is how they do it. They take one little word out of what you say, ignore all the rest, and then begin to magnify it all over the world to make you look like what you actually aren't. And I'm very used to that

The well-meaning white people, I said, had to combat, actively and directly, the racism in other white people. And

only when mankind would submit to the One God who created all—only then would mankind even approach the "peace" of which so much talk could be heard…but toward which so little action was seen. I

Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten . . . not for one second

Is it clear why I have said that the American white man's malignant superiority complex has done him more harm than an invading army?

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.

If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.

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.