Malcolm X Quotes

Discrimination will impair democracy.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

I value what I learned from being cast in the margins and what that felt like.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

I think 'Humans' is more about provoking the idea that there is a class of beings in society that we treat as less than... as subordinates; people who we treat badly and take for granted. Often they are the same people who work hard to keep the city going. We need to think about that.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

I think history repeats itself. There's a constant conversation between the oppressed and the oppressor. No matter what your field is, whether it's gender equality, the Time's Up movement, or diversity casting, it's always going to be a back-and-forth battle.

This idea of walls, segregation, labels, and 'You against us' and 'We are superior and you are inferior.' Which people are legitimate? Which relationships are legitimate or not? Who declares that under which authority? These are things that are hugely important.

I feel that discrimination and hierarchy is something that people have to face constantly.

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

If you're perpetuating discrimination, you're perpetuating inequality.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Society is better off without certain people.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

Men's indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people.