Malcolm X Speaks Quotes

“The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you'll never know where you'll get an idea from...”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizen's Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any kind of nonviolent talk.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“And just as you see the oppressed people all over the world today getting together, the Black people in the West are also seeing that they are oppressed. Instead of just calling themselves an oppressed minority in the States, they are part of the oppressed masses of people all over the world today who are crying out for action against the common oppressor.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Therefore the colonial powers couldn't stay there by force, and America, the new colonial power, neocolonial power, or neoimperialist power, also couldn't stay there by force. So they came up with a "friendly" approach, a new approach which was friendly. Benevolent colonialism or philanthropic imperialism. They called it humanitarianism, or dollarism. And whereas the Africans could fight against colonialism, they found it difficult to fight against dollarism, or to condemn dollars.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“I don't believe in any form of unjustified extremism. But I believe that when a man is exercising extremism, a human being is exercising extremism in defence of liberty for human beings, it is no vice. And when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings, I say he's a sinner.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“As soon as they have unity of their people in their country, they're a dictator. If there is no division, fighting, and squabbling going on, the leader of that country is a dictator if he is an African; but as long as it is in America, he's just an American president who has the support of the people.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“Revolutions are fought to get control of land, to remove the absentee landlord and gain control of the land and the institutions that flow from that land.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements

“If you're afraid of black nationalism, you're afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements