Malcolm X Quotes

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

I can preach until your deaf and dumb, I'm in that soul saving army beating on that big bass drum.

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.

The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

She died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type.

The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others

[Religious] superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

I'm not even religious, but I get fanaticism. I get the appeal of it.

I know for a fact that we're not pushed or promoted to speak about God with fervor.

Things I've done in the past always make me cringe a bit. When I think back to being a Christian. Proselytising to people, that makes me cringe.

[Faith] is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself. Yet so many religious people take their wishes for reality.

The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science was the name of a vague dread - a dangerous enemy. They did not know much, but they believed a great deal.

People who think God is on their side are capable of the most inhumane acts. (Petrov)

Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.