The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell you a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.

I was going to become one of the most depraved parasitical hustlers among New York’s eight million people—four million of whom work, and the other four million of whom live off them.

almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early rush.

this was the worst of the ghetto, the poorest people, the ones who in every ghetto keep themselves narcotized to keep from having to face their miserable existence.

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

In those days only three things in the world scared me: jail, a job, and the Army.