Top 350 Malcolm X Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “I’m speaking from personal experience when I say of any black man who conks today, or any white-wigged black woman, that if they gave the brains in their heads just half as much attention as they do their hair, they would be a thousand times better off.”

— Malcolm X

255. “We’re all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man.”

— Malcolm X

256. “The black nation of Egypt is the only country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology.”

— Malcolm X

257. “I have rarely talked to anyone about my mother, for I believe that I am capable of killing a person, without hesitation, who happened to make the wrong kind of remark about my mother. So I purposely don’t make any opening for some fool to step into.”

— Malcolm X

258. “If something is yours by right, then fight for it or shut up.”

— Malcolm X

259. “Learn the language that they understand, and when they come upon our doorstep to talk we can talk, and they will get the point. There will be a dialog, there will be some communication, and I am quite certain that then there will be some understanding.”

— Malcolm X

260. “A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, they do with crippled minds.”

— Malcolm X

261. “No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.”

— Malcolm X

262. “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

263. “A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t ’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.”

— Malcolm X

264. “Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.”

— Malcolm X

265. “Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”

— Malcolm X

266. “Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill that dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it.”

— Malcolm X

267. “If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress.”

— Malcolm X

268. “I’ll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.”

— Malcolm X

269. “Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.”

— Malcolm X

270. “It’s a crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men both. Little innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no history. Little black children seeing, before they could talk, that their parents considered themselves inferior. Innocent black children growing up, living out their lives, dying of old age – and all of their lives ashamed of being black. But the truth is pouring out of the bag now.”

— Malcolm X

271. “The day that the black man takes an uncompromising step and realizes that he’s within his rights, when his own freedom is being jeopardized, to use any means necessary to bring about his freedom or put a halt to that injustice, I don’t think he’ll be by himself.”

— Malcolm X

272. “I don’t care how nice one is to you, the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

— Malcolm X

273. “No sane black man really wants integration! No sane white man really wants integration!”

— Malcolm X

274. “Stumbling isn’t falling.”

— Malcolm X

275. “Every morning when I wake up, now, I regard it as having another borrowed day.”

— Malcolm X

276. “A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not in reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.”

— Malcolm X

277. “Revolution is always based on land. Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee.”

— Malcolm X

278. “After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming, a bill owed to us that must be collected.”

— Malcolm X

279. “It showed me how any country’s moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women – especially its young women.”

— Malcolm X

280. “In any organization, someone must be the boss. If it’s even just one person, you’ve got to be the boss of yourself.”

— Malcolm X

281. “If it’s necessary to form a Black Nationalist army, we’ll form a Black Nationalist army. It’ll be ballot or the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death.”

— Malcolm X

282. “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being – neither white, black, brown, or red.”

— Malcolm X

283. “Much of what I say might sound like it’s stirring up trouble, but it’s the truth!”

— Malcolm X

284. “I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man – and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color.”

— Malcolm X

285. “That morning was when I first began to reappraise the ‘white man.’ It was when I first began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions.”

— Malcolm X

286. “I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don’t believe in any form of discrimination or segregation.”

— Malcolm X

287. “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

288. “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

289. “My feeling about in-laws was that they were outlaws.”

— Malcolm X

290. “I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him. I’m not that way-out.”

— Malcolm X

291. “I saw all races, all colors, blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists, no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words.”

— Malcolm X

292. “We do not condemn the preachers as an individual but we condemn what they teach. We urge that the preachers teach the truth, to teach our people the one important guiding rule of conduct – unity of purpose.”

— Malcolm X

293. “I had blind faith in him. My faith in Elijah Muhammad was more blind and more uncompromising than any faith that any man has ever had for another man. And so I didn’t try and see him as he actually was.”

— Malcolm X

294. “All of us – who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries – were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.”

— Malcolm X

295. “As I say, if we bring up religion we’ll have differences; we’ll have arguments; and we’ll never be able to get together.”

— Malcolm X

296. “I don’t feel that I am a visitor in Ghana or in any part of Africa. I feel that I am at home.”

— Malcolm X

297. “I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.”

— Malcolm X

298. “They don’t stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.”

— Malcolm X

299. “I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.”

— Malcolm X

300. “Everybody shall be accepted no matter what they stand for, you are not always going to agree on their faith.”

— Malcolm X