Top 350 Malcolm X Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self defense; I call it intelligence.”

— Malcolm X

52. “Who taught you to hate yourself?”

— Malcolm X

53. “So over you is the greatest enemy a man can have and that is fear. I know some of you are afraid to listen to the truth-you have been raised on fear and lies. But I am going to preach to you the truth until you are free of that fear...”

— Malcolm X

54. “If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.”

— Malcolm X

55. “Hatred and anger are powerless when met with kindness.”

— Malcolm X

56. “I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream – I see an American nightmare.”

— Malcolm X

57. “Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”

— Malcolm X

58. “That’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your foot on my neck.”

— Malcolm X

59. “One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.”

— Malcolm X

60. “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

61. “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.”

— Malcolm X

62. “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

63. “Power never takes a back step only in the face of more power.”

— Malcolm X

64. “Of all our studies, it is history that is best qualified to reward our research.”

— Malcolm X

65. “Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”

— Malcolm X

66. “A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire, or preserve his freedom.”

— Malcolm X

67. “Only the mistakes were mine.”

— Malcolm X

68. “Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.”

— Malcolm X

69. “Our objective is complete freedom, justice and equality by any means necessary.”

— Malcolm X

70. “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.”

— Malcolm X

71. “Just because a cat has kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.”

— Malcolm X

72. “Respect me, or put me to death.”

— Malcolm X

73. “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”

— Malcolm X

74. “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.”

— Malcolm X

75. “We are fighting for the right to live as free humans in this society. In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights.”

— Malcolm X

76. “As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything.”

— Malcolm X

77. “My sincerity is my credentials.”

— Malcolm X

78. “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.”

— Malcolm X

79. “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”

— Malcolm X

80. “The zionist argument to justify Israel’s present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history.”

— Malcolm X

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

— Malcolm X

82. “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”

— Malcolm X

83. “Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.”

— Malcolm X

84. “I am a Muslim, because it’s 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.”

— Malcolm X

85. “It takes two to tango; when I go, you go.”

— Malcolm X

86. “In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.”

— Malcolm X

87. “Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.”

— Malcolm X

88. “Let’s cool it, brothers.”

— Malcolm X

89. “I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need.”

— Malcolm X

90. “We’re not Americans, we’re Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock – that rock landed on us.”

— Malcolm X

91. “I don’t believe in any form of unjustified extremism! But when a man is exercising extremism – a human being is exercising extremism – in defense of liberty for human beings it’s no vice, and when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings I say he is a sinner.”

— Malcolm X

92. “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.”

— Malcolm X

93. “A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.”

— Malcolm X

94. “To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or a hen not to cackle.”

— Malcolm X

95. “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the...”

— Malcolm X

96. “My beliefs are now one hundred percent against racism and segregation in any form and I also believe that we don’t judge a person by the color of his skin but rather by his deeds.”

— Malcolm X

97. “A new world order is in the making, and it is up to us to prepare ourselves that we may take our rightful place in it.”

— Malcolm X

98. “The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba – yes Cuba too.”

— Malcolm X

99. “If you are Black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. As long as you are South of the Canadian border, you are South.”

— Malcolm X

100. “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