The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

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

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.

that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.

Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

“Gentlemen, I finished the eighth grade in Mason, Michigan. My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master’s was taken in prison.

“I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda,” I had written to these friends. “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

the white man is not inherently evil, but America’s racist society influences him to act evilly.

I said that on the American racial level, we had to approach the black man’s struggle against the white man’s racism as a human problem, that we had to forget hypocritical politics and propaganda.