Malcolm X Inspirational Quotes: A Powerful Collection to Ignite Your Spirit

"There can be no Black-White unity until there is first some Black unity. We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves."

- Malcolm X

"There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time."

- Malcolm X

"It's liberty or death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody."

- Malcolm X

"A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything."

- Malcolm X

"When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire…or preserve his freedom."

- Malcolm X

"You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being."

- Malcolm X

"If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary."

- Malcolm X

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

- Malcolm X

"You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."

- Malcolm X

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

- Malcolm X

"There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time."

- Malcolm X

"Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world."

- Malcolm X

"There is nothing in our book, the Koran, 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 puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion."

- Malcolm X

"If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country."

- Malcolm X

"Early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise."

- Malcolm X

"I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight."

- Malcolm X

"We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience and patience creates unity."

- Malcolm X

"You can’t separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."

- Malcolm X

"I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

- Malcolm X

"Truth is on the side of the oppressed."

- Malcolm X

"You don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution."

- Malcolm X

"Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today."

- Malcolm X

"I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else’s control. I feel that what I’m thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!"

- Malcolm X

"Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks."

- Malcolm X

"A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself."

- Malcolm X

"I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action."

- Malcolm X

"I feel like a man who has been asleep somewhat and under someone else's control. I feel that what I'm thinking and saying is now for myself. Before it was for and by the guidance of Elijah Muhammad. Now I think with my own mind, sir!"

- Malcolm X

"Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth."

- Malcolm X

"I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that 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 systems of exploitation."

- Malcolm X

"It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country."

- Malcolm X

"When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire . . . or preserve his freedom."

- Malcolm X

"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."

- Malcolm X

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action."

- Malcolm X

"I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color."

- Malcolm X

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

- Malcolm X

"It's got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you're afraid to use an expression like that, you should get back in the cotton patch, you should get back in the alley."

- Malcolm X

"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 don't think it will be based on the color of the skin..."

- Malcolm X

"Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world."

- Malcolm X

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

- Malcolm X

"You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being."

- Malcolm X

"It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come."

- Malcolm X

"Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power."

- Malcolm X

"The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans."

- Malcolm X

"You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."

- Malcolm X

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."

- Malcolm X

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

- Malcolm X

"Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner. You must be eating some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American."

- Malcolm X

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

- Malcolm X

"The future belongs to those who prepare for it today."

- Malcolm X

"Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power."

- Malcolm X

"You can't legislate good will - that comes through education."

- Malcolm X

"If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary."

- Malcolm X

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today."

- Malcolm X

"Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."

- Malcolm X

"When we see that our problem is so complicated and so all-encompassing in its intent and content, then we realize that it is no longer a Negro problem, confined only to the American Negro; that it is no longer an American problem, confined only to America, but it is a problem for humanity."

- Malcolm X

"I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color."

- Malcolm X

"I want to be remembered as someone who was sincere. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity."

- Malcolm X

"Hatred and anger are powerless when met with kindness."

- Malcolm X

"If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

- Malcolm X

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."

- Malcolm X

"Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner. You must be eating some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American."

- Malcolm X

"They put your mind right in a bag, and take it wherever they want."

- Malcolm X

"I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street."

- Malcolm X

"I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence."

- Malcolm X

"I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion."

- Malcolm X

"There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent."

- Malcolm X

"It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'"

- Malcolm X

"The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery. The last name of my forefathers was taken from them when they were brought to America and made slaves, and then the name of the slave master was given, which we refuse, we reject that name today and refuse it. I never acknowledge it whatsoever."

- Malcolm X

"In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That... was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about 'white men.'"

- Malcolm X

"We won't organize any black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have sold us out. Both of them have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party."

- Malcolm X

"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment."

- Malcolm X

"I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression."

- Malcolm X

"America preaches integration and practices segregation."

- Malcolm X

"The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God."

- Malcolm X

"You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker."

- Malcolm X

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success."

- Malcolm X

"History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals."

- Malcolm X

"Stumbling is not falling."

- Malcolm X

"Nonviolence is fine as long as it works."

- Malcolm X

"I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence."

- Malcolm X

"I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil."

- Malcolm X

"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, even eaten with people who in America would have been considered 'white,' but the 'white' attitude had been removed from their minds by the religion of Islam."

- Malcolm X

"No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people."

- Malcolm X

"If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality."

- Malcolm X

"You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can't hate Africa and not hate yourself."

- Malcolm X

"We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us."

- Malcolm X

"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us."

- Malcolm X

"The thing that you have to understand about those of us in the Black Muslim movement was that all of us believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. We believed in him. We actually believed that God, in Detroit by the way, that God had taught him and all of that. I always believed that he believed in himself. And I was shocked when I found out that he himself didn't believe it."

- Malcolm X

"I want Dr. King to know that I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King."

- Malcolm X

"A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man."

- Malcolm X

"I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream--I see an American nightmare."

- Malcolm X

"It’s just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being."

- Malcolm X

"During the past seven days of this holy pilgrimage, while undergoing the rituals of the hajj [pilgrimage], I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God—not only with some of this earth’s most powerful kings, cabinet members, potentates and other forms of political and religious rulers —but also with fellow‐Muslims whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, and whose hair was the blondest of blond—yet it was the first time in my life that I didn’t see them as ‘White’ men. I could look into their faces and see that these didn’t regard themselves as ‘White’"

- Malcolm X

"To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal."

- Malcolm X

"I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action."

- Malcolm X

"Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today."

- Malcolm X

"The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'"

- Malcolm X

"There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States."

- Malcolm X

"My father didn't know his real name. My father got his name from his grandfather and he got his name from his grandfather and he got it from the slave master."

- Malcolm X

"The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless."

- Malcolm X

"What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise."

- Malcolm X

"America is the first country... that can actually have a bloodless revolution."

- Malcolm X

"In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure."

- Malcolm X

"We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad feel that when you try and pass integration laws here in America, forcing white people to pretend that they are accepting black people, what you are doing is making white people act in a hypocritical way."

- Malcolm X

"When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent."

- Malcolm X

"In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed."

- Malcolm X

"We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us."

- Malcolm X

"How can you thank a man for giving you what's already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?"

- Malcolm X

"Dr. King wants the same thing I want. Freedom."

- Malcolm X

"...I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did."

- Malcolm X

"I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King."

- Malcolm X

"History proves that the white man is a devil."

- Malcolm X