In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
~ Malcolm X
If ballots won't work, bullets will.
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
If you have a dog, I must have a dog. If you have a rifle, I must have a rifle. If you have a club, I must have a club. This is equality.
I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense I call it intelligence.
I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.
There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.
There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment.
History proves that the white man is a devil.
History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
The Negro revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the Government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.
Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.
You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.
Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Without education, you are not going anywhere in this world.
You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.
Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that God, now, is about to establish a kingdom on this earth, based upon brotherhood and peace. And the white man is against brotherhood, and the white man is against peace.
Power doesn't back up in the face of a smile, or in the face of a threat of some kind of nonviolent loving action. It's not the nature of power to back up in the face of anything but some more power.
If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.
I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.
Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.
In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That... was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about 'white men.'
If you're not ready to die for it, put the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary.
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
In the Bible, God offered the Pharaoh freedom if he would just let the oppressed people free to go to the land of milk and honey. But the Pharaoh disobeyed, and he was destroyed.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
