Malcolm X Quotes

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

The white man is by nature a devil and must be destroyed.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

It isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

This war is really the greatest insanity in which white races have ever been engaged.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?

The white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

It's almost impossible to separate the actions, or it's also, it's almost impossible to separate the oppression and exploitation, criminal oppression and criminal exploitation of the American negro from the color of the skin of the person who is the oppressor or the exploiter.

It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

For their abuse of [the Black African] race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.

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

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

Any time a negro community lives under fear that its churches are going to be bombed, then they have to realize they're living in a war zone.

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

You can't have anything valuable in your house. Niggers will break in and take it all! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people don't like about black people. It's like our own personal civil war. On one side, there's black people. On the other, you've got niggers. The niggers have got to go. I love black people, but I hate niggers. I am tired of niggers. Tired, tired, tired.