Ballot Or The Bullet Quotes

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

Whether you use bullets or ballots, you’ve got to aim well; don’t strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.

From the beginning I felt that there were only two ways to create change for black people in this country — either politically or by open armed revolution. Malcolm defined it succinctly — the ballot or the bullet. Since I believe that human life is uniquely valuable and important, for me the choice had to be the creative use of the ballot. I still believe I was right. I hope America never succeeds in changing my mind.  

If ballots won't work, bullets will.

This is why I say it's the ballot or the bullet. It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

You don't have a revolution in which you love your enemy. And you don't have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.

The essence of Lenin’s speeches during this period was “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.” And it was.

Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion, that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by war—teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.” In

I'm not the kind of person who come here to say what you like. I'm going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not.

To change the world by bullets or ballots was a useless procedure. If the workers ever did get a majority of either, they would have the envy and greed in their hearts and would be chained by these as much as by the chains of the master class. And the State which they would like to call a Cooperative Commonwealth would be based on power; the state would not wither away but would grow. Therefore the only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.

In famous speeches such as “Message to the Grassroots” and “Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm did not eschew politics. Rather, he suggested that Black people use their voting rights to develop an alternative power base. He remained deeply critical of the traditional Civil Rights leadership but advocated for a Black united front in which various political currents could contend. He also insisted on making self-defense a reality, not just a slogan, and held out the idea that a Black Nationalist army might eventually form if the Black masses were not given full rights.

Malcolm X was as good as his word. He said, “Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets. They know it is useless to ask their enemy for justice. And surely whites are the enemies of blacks, otherwise how did we get to this country in the first place?

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

If I think of the ballot as a potential bullet, I will be more careful when I vote. The word vote comes from the Latin word votum, which means "will." When I cast my vote, I express my will. Indeed, if my vote is decisive or a part of the winning majority, then I am not merely expressing my will but imposing my will on others. Many people think that the vote is merely a means to express personal desires or to seek personal gain, usually at the expense of others. On the contrary, to be ethically scrupulous in the casting of votes, we must vote only for what is just. To vote for a vested interest without just cause is to exercise tyranny.

The political philosophy of black nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community. The time when white people can come in our community and get us to vote for them so that they can be our political leaders and tell us what to do and what not to do is long gone.

So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle – problem – into the United Nations and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans right down to the year of 1964 and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world?

And we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you fight it on the level of civil rights, you're under Uncle Sam's jurisdiction. You're going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem. He's the criminal! You don't take your case to the criminal, you take your criminal to court.

Counting polls required assembling—all in favor of the Federalist stand here, all in favor of the Republican over there—and in places where voting was done by ballot, casting a ballot generally meant tossing a ball into a box. The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballota, meaning a little ball—and early Americans who used ballots cast pea or pebbles, or, not uncommonly, bullets.

Malcolm was such a spellbinding orator that the fact that he was also a political theoretician is little appreciated, but he was. He advocated, for example, that instead of pursuing the diversionary goal of integration, Black people ought to control their own communities economically and politically and fight to exercise their Fifteenth Amendment right to vote nationwide. Then they could extricate themselves from the hypocritical grasp of the two-party system and be an independent political power in their own right. But if America was unwilling to “do the right thing,” voting-wise and otherwise, Malcolm advised Blacks to emulate the revolutionary struggles of Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, et al. and fight for their liberation too, i.e., “the Ballot or the Bullet.” Accordingly,

When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare. We haven't benefited from America's democracy. We've only suffered from America's hypocrisy.

I will not say that we may not sooner or later be compelled to meet force by force; but the time has not yet come, and if we are true to ourselves, may never come. Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till November, and fire ballots at them in return; and by that peaceful policy, I believe we shall ultimately win.

If I could have chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other holding a rifle. The portrait communicated everything I wanted to be—controlled, intelligent, and beyond the fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm’s speeches—“Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet”—down at Everyone’s Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue, and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I felt before the heroes of February, distilled and quotable. “Don’t give up your life, preserve your life,” he would say. “And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven.” This was not boasting—it was a declaration of equality rooted not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in the sanctity of the black body.

Saul Alinsky, the Marxist radical, told his followers how to mask their real agenda. Speaking of the current political structure, he said, “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”5 Note the deception: For now, let us be in favor of peace and reformation until we are in power. Then we’ll abandon the ballot box in favor of the bullet.

Natalie, this entire century has been a miserable melodrama written by third-rate minds at the expense of other people’s souls and lives. We can’t stop it. Even if we put an end to these…these aberrations, it will only shift the spotlight to some other carrion-eating actor in this violent farce. These things are done every day by people with no shred of this absurd psychic ability…people exercising power in the form of violence by right of their place, position, by bullet or ballot or the point of their knife blade…but by God these sons of bitches hurt our family, our friends, and we’re going to stop them.

America is just as much a colonial power as England ever was. America is just as much a colonial power as France ever was. In fact, America is more so a colonial power than they, because she is a hypocritical colonial power behind it. What is 20th — what, what do you call second-class citizenship? Why, that's colonization. Second-class citizenship is nothing but 20th slavery. How you gonna to tell me you're a second-class citizen? They don't have second-class citizenship in any other government on this Earth. They just have slaves and people who are free! Well, this country is a hypocrite! They try and make you think they set you free by calling you a second-class citizen. No, you're nothing but a 20th century slave.

The Taliban recruit with a nifty combination of presenting both immense horror and a way out.

After ’96 Massoud retreated in the face of a Taliban bombardment, but he addressed the European Parliament in April 2001, warning that the Taliban had connections to al-Qaeda, and that a major terror attack was imminent.

They do not believe the Independent Electoral Commission is truly independent, citing numerous examples of deficiencies: staff bias and incompetence, lack of planning and communication, lack of security for observers and lack of action on alleged electoral breaches, regional staff who show people who to vote for, and washable ink for forefingers so people can vote multiple times.

The security situation is now the worst it has ever been it reported, with incidents up 39 per cent on last year.

They each explained their roles, finishing with Conrad, who, indicating the others, said, ‘I get their advice on a piece of paper, shit on it, then make up my own mind.

We talked about issues and what I’m finding. They all agreed the chair of the IEC should go, and suggested that parliament may help with this, although Karzai could well keep him anyway. Their second strategy might be to make him irrelevant, possibly by suggesting that operational involvement is undignified for a man of his power and status. That may work.

There’s a discussion about acronyms, or TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), as Jamie from security calls them.

The catch with arresting him is that his million-strong tribe was helping bring stability to a violent region, and without his criminal influence things are likely to tumble much further out of control. A triumph for the DIA may prove a mid-term disaster for Afghanistan.

Sometimes the people who complain the loudest about theft are thieves themselves.

There was a discussion about success, and broad agreement that qualitative results were more significant than quantitative ones. Success should be defined by three questions: did centres open, did people vote and did it become ‘ordinary’ for people to do so?

I’m told that an easy way to identify Taliban, at least, is to look for people wearing tennis shoes. I have no idea if this is due to status-seeking, desert cool or simple idiocy.

Are they in it for the money? Well, yes, to a degree. But these are good people, genuinely trying to make a difference, and if they are going to give up their Western comforts is it a moral imperative to earn the US$1.90 a day that locals get, or walk everywhere, eat badly and behave in ways that increase the risk of getting killed? I think not, but if you disagree, keep two bucks a day from what you earn and send the rest to Hamid, here at 444 Butcher Street. Oh, and play Russian roulette every week, to help get that local flavour.

I expressed astonishment that someone as important as him seeks involvement in something as mundane as press conferences, when most significant chairmen at his level leave that tedious detail to staff – a first crack at getting him out of the picture if we can’t get him sacked.

The public don’t know the IEC and some ministers don’t even know why we are here either. They say “we have had the election”. It is difficult. ‘You come from a democratic, ordered community. Here, everything is displaced and disordered. Since being here I have done my best to justify the IEC to people. When the chairman of the Indian Electoral Commission was here the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of External Affairs had forgotten the issue, but Karzai cancelled everything to make a meeting. ‘At this time, the IEC has not reached a place where it can conduct an election.

It has been an extraordinary opportunity to get up close and personal with the ‘War on Terror’ and the attempts to portray it as a religious schism, which it isn’t.

The West is running for the exit door of Afghanistan, tired of losing lives, money and political support, just as the Taliban predicted we would. Negotiations have been held with the Taliban to sort out a vision of future governance. We are all but abandoning this beleaguered nation and its oppressed people whom we suggested we’d help. We should be ashamed, but we’re relieved.

Opium is commonly used as a cure-all in the regions. If the baby is crying, a little lump of opium will calm it, if grandpa is sick and the donkey trip to get help takes six days, he may as well do it stoned senseless.

There’s little room for moral qualms. After all, why should a dirt-poor Afghan farmer struggling to keep his family above the poverty line give a shit about a smack freak in the States who has thrown away more wealth than the farmer’s village is likely to see all year? Others rationalise that it may – just possibly – be used for medicine.

George Bush summed it up in his inimitable style: the Taliban, he explained, ‘have no disregard for human life’.

Even Human Rights Watch has accused some leading members of this parliament of war crimes. But this parliament, in a unique move, granted warlords an amnesty against crimes committed during the war. Even [spiritual leader of the Taliban] Mulla Umar can benefit after this amnesty.

Tajiks are Afghan Persians, who speak the language of culture and education, Dari. Many suspect the Pashtun government is plotting against them, while Pashtuns accuse Karzai of capitulating to the Tajiks.

The anti-narcotic agencies have long understood that discouraging poppy cultivation is best achieved by putting the crop at constant risk, so that farmers take a safer option. This has been proven around the world. By far the most effective way to achieve this is by using crop-dusters to dump herbicide. But the president has always opposed this, arguing that it would be misunderstood and cause an uprising, and, ultimately, loss of power. That’s why the international narcs had to scrap their way in to appallingly dangerous areas with ‘tractors and weed-whackers’. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work much at all.

But the military don’t see drug eradication as their issue, and perhaps advisedly so, as cutting off the cash crop of the Taliban would slash insurgency funding but also simultaneously piss off rural hordes, who could well get nasty.

The Anticorruption Commission established by the president is headed by Izzatulla Wasifi, a convicted heroin dealer.

alone.Illiteracy is a misunderstood indicator. The great mass is largely illiterate, yet there is a rich oral tradition and many Afghans are informally educated, articulate and comfortable in society. Many, despite not reading, know the Koran and a number of ahadith by heart.

They welcome us, they despise us; they want our protection, they want to kill us; they need us, they don’t. They want freedom and choice for themselves, but often not for others. They are people; people are difficult.

Then the conspiracy of incompetence, misunderstanding and indifference that is the External Relations Department kicked in.

The motivations of suicide bombers may seem hard to understand, but they are largely under-educated kids, turbocharged with carefully crafted religious mumbo-jumbo, and driven by brainwashing and a promise of paradise for them and their family.

Only a small number of them pump out suicide bombers, but you don’t need too many to cause havoc. The madrassas exist because state schools don’t, so poor people have no choice if they want their children to be schooled. They teach Wahhabism, an austere, warped variant of Islam, and often mix this with military skills.

The government need not kill all the insurgents. It only needs to show them that they cannot win.

[Kerala; Communism, ballots over bullets… Promises, experiments, egalitarianism… Last remaining memory of a shared dream… Beautiful, regretful… Beautiful dreams disappearing on waking up to realities… Realities, regrets that remain… Dialectics eschewed, materialism that remains… These villages are notorious for infanticide, foeticide, STDs, malaria, TB and the more rampant malnourishment, poverty and casteism. All of it killed its people. Along with snake bites, sorcery and quackery. These are the little miracles that my kind take for granted, for we believe we are born with certain entitlements. We fail to see the miracles. Maybe it is for this reason there aren’t many rationalists and atheists hailing from the houses of the poor.

Whether you use bullets or ballots, you've got to aim well; don't strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer

The great-power veto, which paralyzed the security arrangements of the Council, had not been unrealistic. It was merely a sublimation of the veto power actually held by powerful countries in the field of action, in the same way that ballots are not sacred, but only a sublimation of clubs or bullets, in the domestic arena.

In an eloquent conclusion, Lincoln meditated on the larger significance of the war: “Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”143

A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets – which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.

A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.

We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation. All of 'em from the same enemy. The government has failed us. You can't deny that. Any time you're living in the 20th century, 1964, and you walking around here singing "We Shall Overcome," the government has failed you. This is part of what's wrong with you, you do too much singing. Today it's time to stop singing and start swinging.

And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy – all we've seen is hypocrisy.