Malcolm X Quotes

Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.

The only thing that's going to free Huey is gun powder.

The Ballot or the Bullet

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.

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.

George Minot [a Concord neighbor] thinks that it is of no use balloting, for it will not stay, but what you do with the gun will stay so.

There was a price paid for the freedom that we have. And that price was paid in blood…. Somebody paid a price for us to have access to that ballot box.

God forbid that these beautiful countries become, as did St. Domingue, a theatre of blood and of crime under the pretext of establishing liberty, let them rather remain if necessary one century more under the barbarous and imbecile oppression of Spain.

If we don't do something real soon, I think you'll have to agree that we're going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It's one or the other in 1964. It isn't that time is running out—time has run out!

I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve their problems in that way. In the case of peoples who have not obtained the ballot, and who cannot control their states, I again find in my own mind a division of opinion, which is not logical, but purely a rough practical judgment. My own forefathers got their political freedom by violence; that is to say, they overthrew the British crown and made themselves a free Republic. Also by violence they put an end to the enslavement of the black race on this continent.

The ballot has failed us, but the bullet has not.

They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.

I ran because I became convinced after King was shot and killed, and Martin Luther King was one of the great heroes of my life, that politics is not perfect but it's the best available nonviolent means of changing how we live. If we don't like how we live, we can participate in the perfect most revolutionary act in a democracy, it's called voting.

The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.

If I could come out in this book and advocate complete revolution and the violent overthrow of the United States of America, without being thrown in jail, I would not have written The Anarchist Cookbook, and there would be no need for it.

I'll be your number one with a bullet.

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?

The future is best decided by ballots, not bullets.

With effort we can protect the foundation of our democracy, for which so many marched across this bridge, the right to vote.

Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall, For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled, The battle outside ragin', Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin'...

It has taken seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism, but the English do not think they bought their laws too dearly.

I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68