No one can deny the influential impact Malcolm X had on civil rights in America. He was a powerful orator who spoke out against racism and preached Black Nationalism. Malcolm X was known for his powerful speeches and quotes and his words were filled with wisdom and insight.
His beliefs inspired many people in the 1950s and 60s and continue to resonate today. There are plenty of quotes to choose from but the following 39 quotes by Malcolm X stand out as some of the most poignant and profound. As we remember his legacy, let’s reflect on these words of wisdom. Enjoy!
Let the Malcolm X quotes begin…
1) “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” – Malcolm X
2) “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
3) “Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves.” – Malcolm X
4) “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
5) “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
6) “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” – Malcolm X
7) “I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self-defense; I call it intelligence.” – Malcolm X
8) “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
9) “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” – Malcolm X
Malcolm X Quotes on Justice
10) “When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.” – Malcolm X
11) “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
12) “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” – Malcolm X
13) “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
14) “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.” – Malcolm X
15) “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
16) “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.” – Malcolm X
17) “You can’t legislate good will – that comes through education.” – Malcolm X
18) “My alma mater was books, a good library…I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” – Malcolm X
19) “If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.” – Malcolm X
Wrong is wrong…
20) “You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” – Malcolm X
21) “Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.” – Malcolm X
22) “I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” – Malcolm X
23) “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” – Malcolm X
24) “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
25) “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.” – Malcolm X
26) “Stumbling is not falling.” – Malcolm X
27) “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
28) “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.” – Malcolm X
29) “Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday’s and today’s school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.” – Malcolm X
Malcolm X Quotes on the Media
30) “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
31) “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
32) “They put your mind right in a bag, and take it wherever they want.” – Malcolm X
33) “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
34) “I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.” – Malcolm X
Truth…
35) “Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” – Malcolm X
36) “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.” – Malcolm X
37) “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
38) “Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.” – Malcolm X
39) “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
I hope you enjoyed these insightful quotes!
Please share these quotes by Malcolm X with your friends and family.
