Top 350 Malcolm X Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It’ll be the ballot or it’ll be the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death. And if you’re not ready to pay that price don’t use the word freedom in your vocabulary.”

— Malcolm X

202. “Betty’s a good Muslim woman and wife. I don’t imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job.”

— Malcolm X

203. “My family was so poor we were close to eating the holes inside of doughnuts.”

— Malcolm X

204. “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

— Malcolm X

205. “The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying.”

— Malcolm X

206. “If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.”

— Malcolm X

207. “You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.”

— Malcolm X

208. “This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.”

— Malcolm X

209. “Anytime anyone is enslaved, or in any way deprived of his liberty, if that person is a human being, as far as I am concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again.”

— Malcolm X

210. “Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.”

— Malcolm X

211. “You can’t legislate good will – that comes through education.”

— Malcolm X

212. “Speaking like this doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression.”

— Malcolm X

213. “I believe it’s a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself.”

— Malcolm X

214. “It is the process of mis-education that inhibits the full potential of a nation.”

— Malcolm X

215. “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

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

— Malcolm X

217. “We assert that in those areas where the government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of our people, that our peopie are within our rights to protect themselves by whatever means necessary.”

— Malcolm X

218. “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.”

— Malcolm X

219. “Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!”

— Malcolm X

220. “America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don’t have some humor, you’ll crack up.”

— Malcolm X

221. “Anything I do today, I regard as urgent.”

— Malcolm X

222. “We all like chicken.”

— Malcolm X

223. “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.”

— Malcolm X

224. “I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.”

— Malcolm X

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

— Malcolm X

226. “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

227. “The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.”

— Malcolm X

228. “In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he’s motivated, in prison he can change his life.”

— Malcolm X

229. “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

230. “It isn’t the American white man who is a racist, but it’s the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.”

— Malcolm X

231. “In my 39 years on this earth, the Holy city of Makka had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of all and felt like a complete human being.”

— Malcolm X

232. “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.”

— Malcolm X

233. “Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I’ll get nonviolent. But don’t teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.”

— Malcolm X

234. “Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.”

— Malcolm X

235. “You are either free or not free.”

— Malcolm X

236. “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.”

— Malcolm X

237. “In my recent travels into African countries and others, I was impressed by the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white.”

— Malcolm X

238. “Any time you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two thirds of the government and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that party, you’re not only a chump but you’re a traitor to your race.”

— Malcolm X

239. “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it...”

— Malcolm X

240. “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

241. “Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are citizen, you are free; if youre not a citizen you are a slave.”

— Malcolm X

242. “To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive...”

— Malcolm X

243. “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

244. “They asked if I knew what ‘conscientious objector’ meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.”

— Malcolm X

245. “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

246. “Do Your Best Work.”

— Malcolm X

247. “I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.”

— Malcolm X

248. “The political philosophy of black nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community. The time when white people can come in our community and get us to vote for them so that they can be our political leaders and tell us what to do and what not to do is long gone.”

— Malcolm X

249. “Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?”

— Malcolm X

250. “Brothers and sisters, friends and enemies: I just can’t believe that everyone in here is a friend and I don’t want to leave anybody out.”

— Malcolm X