Malcolm X Famous Quotes

Nobody can give you freedom, nobody can give you equality or justice. If you are a man, you take it.

Malcolm himself had no nickname. Occasionally his father called him by other famous Malcolms' last names - "X," or "McLaren," or "McDowell," or "Muggeridge," the last for whom Malcolm was supposedly named - but it always felt less like an affectionate gesture and more like a rebuke, a reminder if what Malcolm should be but clearly was not.

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.

Randolph Bourne … one of the towering public intellectual figures between 1907 and 1918 … wrote a famous essay called ‘The War and the Intellectuals’ … and he says, ‘Idealism should be kept for what is ideal.’ Think about that. Idealism should be kept for what is ideal! It seems to me that what Randolph Bourne is getting at … is that idealism is not boosterism, just as critique is not castigation. But idealism is a bold and defiant highlighting of hypocrisy …. It is a self-critical and self-correcting procedure. Hypocrisy can be found in high places of the powerful as well as in places of the powerless. … It cuts both ways. I think this is precisely what Malcolm X had in mind when he provided his technical definition of what a nigger was. Do you recall what he said? He said, ‘a nigger is a victim of American democracy.’ And note the oxymoronic character and self-contradictory character of this formulation. How could there be a victim of American democracy? Because you point out the hypocrisy and how hypocrisy becomes institutionalized and legalized and you end up with a kind of herrenvolk democracy which, of course, in many ways was the case in the USA until the 1950s.

Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of intellectual development in prison is that of Malcolm X.21 Malcolm Little (as he was born) entered prison immersed in drugs, sex, and petty crime. In prison he met a polymath named John Elton Bembry who was steeped in culture and history, able to hold forth on a wide variety of fascinating topics. On his advice Malcolm began to read—first the dictionary, then books on etymology and linguistics. He studied elementary Latin and German. He converted to Islam, a faith introduced to him by his brothers. In the following years he read the Bible and the Qur’an, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as works of Asian philosophy. He pored over an especially loved book of the archaeological wonders of the East and the West. He learned the history of colonialism, of slavery, and of African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear “like snow off of a roof.”22 He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.