The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

I’ve said that my mother was the one who whipped me—at least she did whenever she wasn’t ashamed to let the neighbors think she was killing me.

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

“Credit is the first step into debt and back into slavery,”

Whites have always hidden or justified all of the guilts they could by ridiculing or blaming Negroes.

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating.

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life—that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business—you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

We were in that world of Negroes who are both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.

I told Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.

But people are always speculating—why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much.

no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his followers to keep up.

“You are present when you are away.”