M.S. Handler > Quotes

“He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of “hatred”—and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“If I had said “Mary had a little lamb,” what probably would have appeared was “Malcolm X Lampoons Mary.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Twenty-two million black men! They have given America four hundred years of toil; they have bled and died in every battle since the Revolution; they were in America before the Pilgrims, and long before the mass immigrations—and they are still today at the bottom of everything!”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Is it clear why I have said that the American white man’s malignant superiority complex has done him more harm than an invading army?”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“That discussion with the ambassador gave me a new insight—one which I like: that the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, ‘Do you hate me?’ The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! “Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The Muslim’s “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns—where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion. In America for centuries it had been just fine as long as the victimized, brutalized and exploited black people had been grinning and begging and “Yessa, Massa” and Uncle Tomming.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending any more time than they must around white people. This “integration” image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them—and that’s a lie!”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The white man has perverted the simple message of love that the Prophet Jesus lived and taught when He walked upon this earth.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Raw, naked truth exchanged between the black man and the white man is what a whole lot more of is needed in this country—to clear the air of the racial mirages, clichés, and lies that this country’s very atmosphere has been filled with for four hundred years.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal. Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends such efforts cultivating!”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“one of my principal rules, which is never to let myself become over-emotional and angry.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“But love transcends just the physical.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“If a black bloc committee told Washington’s worst “nigger-hater,” “We represent ten million votes,” why, that “nigger-hater” would leap up: “Well, how are you? Come on in here!”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“I went to see Dr. Leona A. Turner, who has been my family doctor for years, who practices in East Elmhurst, Long Island.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Conservatism” in America’s politics means “Let’s keep the niggers in their place.” And “liberalism” means “Let’s keep the knee-grows in their place—but tell them we’ll treat them a little better; let’s fool them more, with more promises.” With these choices, I felt that the American black man only needed to choose which one to be eaten by, the “liberal” fox or the “conservative” wolf—because both of them would eat him.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The black man in North America was mentally sick in his cooperative, sheeplike acceptance of the white man’s culture”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“I remember we wound up agreeing that by the year 2000, every schoolchild will be taught the true color of great men of antiquity.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“I must be honest. Negroes—Afro-Americans—showed no inclination to rush to the United Nations and demand justice for themselves here in America. I really had known in advance that they wouldn’t. The American white man has so thoroughly brainwashed the black man to see himself as only a domestic “civil rights” problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the Negro sees that the struggle of the American black man is international.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten…not for one second.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“but the pain he felt when his own family totally rejected him for Elijah Muhammad, and this hurt made Reginald turn insanely upon Elijah Muhammad.”
― M.S. Handler, The Autobiography of Malcolm X