People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.
So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.
You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker
The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba — yes Cuba too.
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.
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.
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.
Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
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.
An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.
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.
My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.
We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
… the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist.
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.
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.
History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.
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.
It’s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
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.
One day, may we all meet together in the light of understanding.
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, fromBirth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive…
Even Samson, the world’s strongest man, was destroyed by the woman who slept in his arms. she was the one whose words hurt him.
Always, every now and then, I had given her a hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this too.
Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.
To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace
You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.
Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.
A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t ‘t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.
No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.
The Algerians were revolutionsists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with Fance, they wanted some land, not some France.
No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn’t shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn’t exist for me.
To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal.
I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.
Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.
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.
How is it possible to write one’s autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?
Power never takes a back step – only in the face of more power.
We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.
I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who is for or against it.
Nobody can give you freedom, nobody can give you equality or justice. If you are a man, you take it.
I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.
In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
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.
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.
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.