Malcolm X Quotes

All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?

Well, my contention is that the political system of this country is so designed criminally to prevent this, that if the black man even started in that direction, which is a mature step and it's the only way to really solve this problem and to prove that he is the intellectual equal of others, why, the racists and the segregationists would fight that harder than they're fighting the present efforts to integrate.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this applecart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. This thing they say of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is all on paper. It doesn't really mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this out to the light that has been under the cover all these years.

There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color...We must fight back.

You can't say the Negro left the Republican Party; the Negro feels he was evicted from the Republican Party.

J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program was designed to prevent a Black Messiah from rising to unite the people.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

I can do an hour-long speech about Democrats taking African Americans for granted, and I'd have a line behind me of very prominent African-Americans who would say, 'Amen.'

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

I'll start with the reality. If we're having problems nationally, we're having problems on the state level and then on the local level, what message is that sending to Black people who are not supposed to be intelligent but the grassroots understand? What that means in this time, as in the time of Moses, it means buckle on your boots and shoes and let's get the hell out of here. As the boys said in the movie; it's time to get out.

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple - talk about class and hope no one notices.

Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.

I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it.

Martin Luther King really was a safety valve for white people. Any time it appeared that the black community was on the verge of really doing what we ought to do based on having been attacked, they put Martin Luther King on television. He was always saying, "We must use nonviolence. We must overcome hate with love." White people loved that. That's why they gave him a Nobel Prize. But when Martin Luther King started condemning the Vietnam War, that's when white people turned against him.

The white people who are guilty of white supremacy are trying to hide their own guilt by accusing The Honorable Elijah Muhammad of teaching black supremacy when he tries to uplift the mentality, the social, mental and economic condition of the black people in America.