Malcolm X Quotes

Ralph Bunche, who is an internationally recognized and respected diplomat, can't stay in a hotel in Georgia, which means that no matter what the accomplishment, the intellectual, the academic, or professional level of a negro is, collectively he stands condemned.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

Racism is a global problem and it is as damaging to Whites as it is to non-Whites. Everyone must fight against it.

When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. Now what's the difference?

I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days.

I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that.

Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL)One man's rights should not be sacrificed for another's prejudices. ...

This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, “Are the blacks good enough to be free?” but, “Have they the right?” So today the question is not, “Will outrages result from freeing humanity?” but, “Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?”

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

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

Racism is wrong, racism is very dangerous.

If I’d been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I’d merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching.

What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?

I struggle with racism every day

I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.

Racism is a blight on the human conscience

We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.

The international community cannot accept that whole communities are marginalized because of the color of their skin. People of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education. Such fundamental wrongs have a long and terrible history.

I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan, and I shouldn't have to run from a black man.

I don't sign for white people.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.