Quotes About Empowerment

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you really want it, you take it.

In any organization, someone must be the boss. If it's even just one person, you've got to be the boss of yourself.

All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.

Bütün uyuyanlar? uyand?rmaya bir tek uyan?k yeter.

Why is the American black man so complacent about being trampled upon? Why doesn't the American black man fight to be a human being?

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.

And concerning anything in this society involved in helping Negroes, the federal government shows an inability to function. But it can function in South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Berlin, and in other places where it has no business. But it can't function in Mississippi.

Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together." (Set the Night on Fire)

If something is yours by right, then fight for it or shut up.

How is the black man going to get 'civil rights' before he first wins his human rights?

Either you are a citizen or you are not a citizen at all. If you are citizen, you are free; if you're not a citizen you are a slave.

This is still one of the black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called "upper class" Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are "different from those others" that they can't see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.

My black brothers and sisters—no one will know who we are…until we know who we are! We never will be able to go anywhere until we know where we are!

Every addict takes junk to escape something, the Muslim explains. He explains that most black junkies really are trying to narcotize themselves against being a black man in the white man's America. But, actually, the Muslim says, the black man taking dope is only helping the white man to prove that the black man is nothing.

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.

There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems.

Malcolm believed, by the way, in Student Power: not only did he feel that the college-educated black, if he could retain (as he must) his sense of reality and history, and refrain from being absorbed into the white world by its material enticements, was obviously better equipped to cope with the problems besetting his people in America, but he also believed, or hoped, that the white college student was more receptive to change than were his parents.

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eye so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth!

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.

So we are all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves.

Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children

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.

And you'll see black women wearing these green and pink and purple and red and platinum-blonde wigs. They're all more ridiculous than a slapstick comedy. It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.

going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.