Top 350 Malcolm X Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.-because you can hardly mention anything I am not curious about.”

— Malcolm X

302. “Each of us should make the most of our lives. We should give life our best-let us use our lives more wisely to chase our dreams, find our true purpose, and be as happy and successful as possible.”

— Malcolm X

303. “You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.”

— Malcolm X

304. “The whites of the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth.”

— Malcolm X

305. “And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the ‘extremes’ in approach to the black man’s problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first – ‘non-violent’ Dr. King, or so-called ‘violent’ me.”

— Malcolm X

306. “Men are attracted by spirit. By power men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power anxieties are created.”

— Malcolm X

307. “If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity – because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.”

— Malcolm X

308. “It’s easy to become a satellite today without even being aware of it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power; the power of the dollar.”

— Malcolm X

309. “You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor.”

— Malcolm X

310. “The junkie can never start to cure himself until he recognizes his true condition.”

— Malcolm X

311. “Once I was, yes. But now I have turned my direction away from anything that’s racist.”

— Malcolm X

312. “You can’t hate the roots of the tree without ending up hating the tree. You can’t hate your origin without ending up hating yourself. You can’t hate the land, your motherland, the place that you come from, and we can’t hate Africa without ending up hating ourselves. The Black man in the Western Hemisphere – North America, Central America, South America, and in the Caribbean – is the best example of how one can be made, skillfully, to hate himself that you can find anywhere on this earth.”

— Malcolm X

313. “I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.”

— Malcolm X

314. “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

315. “Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn’t the American black man fight to be a human being?”

— Malcolm X

316. “I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.”

— Malcolm X

317. “One of my brothers read a lot. His head was forever in some book.”

— Malcolm X

318. “There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.”

— Malcolm X

319. “The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.”

— Malcolm X

320. “Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your – your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.”

— Malcolm X

321. “The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn’t flat.”

— Malcolm X

322. “Revolutions are never peaceful.”

— Malcolm X

323. “Whenever I walk the street and see people ready to get with it, that’s my reward.”

— Malcolm X

324. “Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up-morally, mentally and spiritually.”

— Malcolm X

325. “If the government can’t get the black man justice, then it’s time for the black man to get some justice for himself.”

— Malcolm X

326. “And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.”

— Malcolm X

327. “If you are born in America with a black skin, you’re in prison.”

— Malcolm X

328. “The world since Adam has been white – and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black – and righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and equality for all. And that day is coming – sooner than you think.”

— Malcolm X

329. “No man in our time aroused fear and hatred in the white man as did Malcolm, because in him the white man sensed an implacable foe who could not be had for any price – a man unreservedly committed to the cause of liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.”

— Malcolm X

330. “But they don’t use law-they use law for their interests. They don’t go by law, international, federal, local-nothing! They go by whatever is expedient to protect the interests that are at stake.”

— Malcolm X

331. “Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns – where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.”

— Malcolm X

332. “The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.”

— Malcolm X

333. “If the ballot doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. But let us try the ballot.”

— Malcolm X

334. “Mankind’s history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual.”

— Malcolm X

335. “The Algerians were revolutionsists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with Fance, they wanted some land, not some France.”

— Malcolm X

336. “Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back – and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to leave a scar!”

— Malcolm X

337. “I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.”

— Malcolm X

338. “Let’s just face truth. Facts! Whether or not the white man of the world is able to face truth, and facts, about the true reasons for his troubles – that’s what essentially will determine whether or not he will now survive.”

— Malcolm X

339. “Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man’s America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to “prove” that the black man is nothing.”

— Malcolm X

340. “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...”

— Malcolm X

341. “It has hindered where it might have helped; it has been evasive when it was morally bound to be forthright; it has separated believers on the basis of color, although it has declared its mission to be a universal brotherhood under Jesus Christ. Christian love is the white man’s love for himself and for his race.”

— Malcolm X

342. “I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.”

— Malcolm X

343. “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, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.”

— Malcolm X

344. “American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color differences. And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor could truly live like human beings... 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

345. “I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca.”

— Malcolm X

346. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.”

— Malcolm X

347. “Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate.”

— Malcolm X

348. “Whether you use bullets or ballots, you’ve got to aim well; don’t strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.”

— Malcolm X

349. “When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eye so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!”

— Malcolm X

350. “And we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you fight it on the level of civil rights, you’re under Uncle Sam’s jurisdiction. You’re going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He’s the criminal! You don’t take your case to the criminal, you take your criminal to court.”

— Malcolm X