Malcolm X Autobiography Quotes

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle.

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.

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

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.

In fact, once he is motivated no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.

I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.

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.

One day, may we all meet together in the light of understanding.

Don't condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water, just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to say that yours is better." -said by Elijah Muhammad to Malcolm X

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda… 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.

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

لقد تعلمت باكراَ إن الحق لا يعطي لمن يسكت عنه, وإن على المرء أن يحدث بعض الضجيج إن أراد أن يحصل على شيء

I saw all races, all colors, blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists, no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words

This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn't gambling, he's cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely.

هنا يرقد رجل اصفر قتله رجل اسود في حرب رجل أبيض كان قد قتل كل الرجال الحمر

ارى ان السجن يأتي بعد الجامعة مباشرة كأنسب مكان لمن يريد ان يفكر

We all like chicken

I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.

لا يدرك الناس أن كتابا واحدا قد يغير حياة انسان

إن الناس لا تعرف أن كتاباً واحداً كفيلاً بأن يغير مجرى حياة الإنسان

إنني لا أحتمل شخصاَ لايحمل الساعة لأن ذلك يوضح لي إنه لا يقدر الوقت

انني كنت أسفل سافلين في قاع المجتمع الأمريكي عندما اهتديت الى الله و الى الإسلام تغير مجرى حياتي

إن الزوجة في الحضارة الغربية تفقد جاذبيتها بمجرد ما تفقد جمالها المادي أما الإسلام فيحثنا على رؤية جمال المرأة الباطني

في كل الأعمال يحدد نجاحنا أو فشلنا مدى تقديرنا وإحترامنا للوقت

عرفت أن الحقيقة تصل الى قلوب العصاة إذا عرفوا و اعترفوا بأنهم عصاة

إن الإستماع فن من الفنون. عندما يتكلم الرجل أنتبه إلى صوته لأعرف هل هو صادق فيما يقوله

هل تعرف إن بعض أعظم الرجال الذين عرفهم التاريخ لم يعترف بهم إلا بعدما واراهم التراب؟

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

When I am dead--I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form--I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate". He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol, of "hatred"--and that will help him escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.

And because I had been a hustler, I knew better than all whites knew, and better than nearly all of the black 'leaders' knew, that actually the most dangerous black man in America was the ghetto hustler. Why do I say this? The hustler, out there in the ghetto jungles, has less respect for the white power structure than any other Negro in North America. The ghetto hustler is internally restrained by nothing. He has no religion, no concept of morality, no civic responsibility, no fear--nothing. To survive, he is out there constantly preying upon others, probing for any human weakness like a ferret. The ghetto hustler is forever frustrated, restless, and anxious for some 'action'. Whatever he undertakes, he commits himself to it fully, absolutely. What makes the ghetto hustler yet more dangerous is his 'glamour' image to the school-dropout youth in the ghetto.These ghetto teen-agers see the hell caught by their parents struggling to get somewhere, or see that they have given up struggling in the prejudiced, intolerant white man’s world. The ghetto teen-agers make up their own minds they would rather be like the hustlers whom they see dressed ‘sharp’ and flashing money and displaying no respect for anybody or anything. So the ghetto youth become attracted to the hustler worlds of dope, thievery, prostitution, and general crime and immorality.

عاهدت الله على الا أنسى أن الاسلام هو الذى اعطانى الاجنحة التى احلق بها ولم انس ذلك ابدا ... لم أنسه لحظة واحدة

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.

Truth does not change, only our awareness of it.

إن لدي من الشجاعة مايسمح بأن اقول لك إنني لا أعرف ما هي فلسفتي ولكنني رجل مرن

I Used the Word 'Negro' and I was Firmly Corrected

It is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

وانا على يقين ان امريكا فى امس الحاجة الحاجة الى الاسلام

إذا كان هناك من يقوم بعمل يشبه عملك ويتفوق عليك فهو لامحالة يفعل شيئا لاتفعله

لكنني لا أخشى أياَ منهم لأنني أملك كل ما أحتاجه, أملك الحقيقة

إن حسن المعاملة لا يعني لي شيئاً ما دام الرجل الأبيض لن ينظر إليّ أبداً كما ينظر الى نفسه

Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. I

He said, one time, that no true leader burdened his followers with a greater load than they could carry, and no true leader sets too fast a pace for his follows to keep up.

سواء كان ما يستعمله الإنسان رصاصاَ أو بطاقات اقتراع فإن عليه أن يحسن الرماية وألا يستهدف الدمية ولكن من يحركها

Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did.

أن السبيل الوحيد الى الحقيقة هو الإعتراف بالذنب

إن مشتري المسروق أنذل من السارق لأنه يسرق مرتين

I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then as I still expect today

كانت حياتي سلسة من التحولات

I came here to tell the truth - and if the truth condemns America, then she stands condemned!

I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.

لو كانت المسيحية قد وجدت في ألمانيا لكان ستة ملايين من اليهود مايزالون على قيد الحياة

أنت تثق فيهم, أما أنا فلا. لقد درستَ عنهم في المدارس ماأرادوك أن تدرسه أما أنا فقد درستهم في الشوارع والسجون, أي على الطبيعة

لقد تكلمت مع رجال كانوا في السجون و أدهشني أنهم نسوا كل وصماتها إلا وصمة القضبان

يجب ان نتعلم من الاطفال عدم الخجل من الفشل و ان نقوم و نعيد الكرة

كنت قد تركت جزءا من نفسى فى مكة المكرمة وأخذت جزءا منها معى الى الابد

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars--caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He will never get completely over the memory of the bars.

هل يمكن للإنسان أن يكتب سيرته الذاتية في عالم يتغير بهذه السرعة؟

You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

قلت لهم عندما زرت مكة ان الخطأ خطأهم لانهم لايفعلون كل مايجب للتعريف بلاسلام الحقيقى فى الغرب فيتركون الباب مفتوحا أمام المشعوذين والمضللين

Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I’m snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

إنني لا أحتمل شخصاً لايحمل الساعة لأن ذلك يوضح لي أنه لايُقدّر الوقت

الرجال الذين غيروا مجرى التاريخ استطاعوا أن يغيروا نظرة الناس إلى نفسها, هتلر والمسيح وستالين وبوذا... والايجا محمد المحترم

ان اسمى مايطمح اليه المسلم هو ان يموت على ارض المعركة وليس فى فراشه

Tell him that he and all of the other moderate Negroes who are getting somewhere need to always remember that it was us extremists who made it possible.

No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.

I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose. - Malcom X

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

America is subsidizing what is left of the prestige and strength of the once mighty Britain. The sun has set forever on that monocled, pith-helmeted resident colonialist, sipping tea with his delicate lady in the non-white colonies being systematically robbed of every valuable resource. Britain's superfluous royalty and nobility now exist by charging tourists to inspect the once baronial castles, and by selling memoirs, perfumes, autographs, titles, and even themselves.

في كل الأعمال يحدد نجاحنا أو فشلنا مدى تقديرنا واحترامنا للوقت

لقد أطفأ الرجل الأبيض نور عيوننا وجاء الأن يتهمنا بعدم القدرة على البصر

على من يريد أن يتبعني ويتبع حركتي أن يكون مستعدا لدخول السجون والمستشفيات والإنتقال إلى المقابر قبل أن يستطيع أن يقول إنه حر حقاً

مع السرعة التي تتغير بها الاحداث في أيامنا هذه قد يحدث في المساء ما ينسخ قول المرء في الصباح.

All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.

Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual

Men are attracted by spirit. By power men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power anxieties are created.

بدأت أدرك أهمية السجاد عند المسلمين. كان لكل شخص سجادة صلاة ولكل زوجين أو جماعة من الناس سجاد كبير.. وصلى المسلمون في تلك الغرفة كل على سجادته ثم فرشوا فوق سجاد كبير منديلاً وأكلوا عليه فأصبح السجاد غرفة طعام.. ثم حملوا الصحون والمنديل وجلسوا على السجاد فأصبح السجاد غرفة جلوس، وكانوا من قبل يفترشونه فكان غرفة نوم.. حينذاك أدركت لماذا كان تاجر المسروقات في بوسطن يدفع لنا كل تلك المبالغ في السجاد الشرقي، أدركت أن غلاءه يعود إلى اتقانه الذي يعود إلى أهميته في بلاد له فيها كل هذه الوجه من الاستعمال

All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life - that 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.

أنا لا أقول أن السجون يجب ان تغلق. انا اقول إنها يجب ان تكون بلا قضبان، ان رجلاً يوضع داخل القضبان لا يمكن أن يُصلَح او ينسى لأنه لا يمكن أن يتغلب على ذكرى القضبان ابدا مهما حاول أو أن يمحوها من ذاكرته.

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.

You see, Islam is the only religion that gives both husband and wife a true understanding of what love is. The Western “love” concept, you take it apart, it really is lust. But love transcends just the physical. Love is disposition, behaviour, attitude, thoughts, likes, dislikes - these things make a beautiful woman, a beautiful wife. This is the beauty that never fades. You find in your Western civilisation that when a man’s wife’s physical beauty fails, she loses her attraction. But Islam teaches us to look into the woman, and teaches her to look into us.

ولكن الصلاة كانت اصعب امتحان مررت به فى حياتى كلها .كان الايمان كااقتناع نظرى سهلا اما السجود فقد احتجت معة الى اسبوع كامل من الاخذ والرد وانت تعرف الخلفية التى كنت انطلق منها وأننى لم أثن ركبتى ابدا الا التقاط قفل بيت اسرقة فكنت اهم بالسجود فأشعر بالحرج والخجل وأتراجع . ذلك أن الاعتراف بالذنب أمام الله وطلب مغفرته شئ عسير على المذنب وعندما نجحت فى ذلك اخيرا وقعت ساجدا ولم اعرف ماذا اقول !

Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back--and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’, his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.

I believed he had no human weaknesses or faults, and that, therefore, he could make no mistakes and that he could do no wrong. There on a Holy World hilltop, I realized how very dangerous it is for people to hold any human being in such esteem, especially to consider anyone some sort of "divinely guided" and "protected" person.

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, "I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd want to stop one.

Looking back, I think I really was at least slightly out of my mind. I viewed narcotics as most people regard food. I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties. Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time. But then, I think I deliberately invited death in many, sometimes insane, ways.

I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was. But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient. Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

All of that Hollywood stuff! Like these women wanting men to pick them up and carry them across thresholds and some of them weigh more than you do. I don't know how many marriage breakups are caused by these movie and television addicted women expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out like Cinderella for dinner and dancing then getting mad when a poor, scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all day, looking for some food. ~Malcolm X

One call that I never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los Angeles. His voice said, "Alex Haley?" I said, sleepily, "Yes? Oh, hey, Malcolm!" His voice said, "I trust you seventy percent" -- and then he hung up. I lay a short time thinking about him and I went back to sleep feeling warmed by that call, as I still am warmed to remember it. Neither of us ever mentioned it." The Autobiography of Malcolm X

American society makes it next to impossible for humans to meet in America and not be conscious of their color differences. And we both agreed that if racism could be removed, America could offer a society where rich and poor could truly live like human beings....The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.

Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They took her to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. My mother remained in the same hospital at Kalamazoo for about 26 years. My last visit, when I knew I would never come to see her again-there-was in 1952. I was twenty-seven. My brother Philbert had told me that on his last visit, she had recognized him somewhat. "In spots" he said. But she didn't recognize me at all. She stared at me. She didn't know who I was. Her mind, when I tried to talk, to reach her, was somewhere else. I asked, "Mama, do you know what day it is?" She said, staring, "All the people have gone." I can't describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me. It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers." -Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X