The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

Getting greedy is the quickest road to prison.

The white man’s emotions superseded his intelligence. He will commit against non-whites the most incredible spontaneous emotional acts, so psyche-deep is his “white superiority” complex.

Nobody wanted to know anything at all about the robberies. All they could see was that we had taken the white man’s women.

They were still white—burglars or not. Their worst crime was their involvement with Negroes.

A white woman might blow up at her husband and scream and yell and call him every name she can think of, and say the most vicious things in an effort to hurt him, and talk about his mother and his grandmother, too, but one thing she never will tell him herself is that she is going with a black man. That’s one automatic red murder flag to the white man, and his woman knows it.

Sometimes, recalling all of this, I don’t know, to tell the truth, how I am alive to tell it today. They say God takes care of fools and babies. I’ve so often thought that Allah was watching over me. Through all of this time of my life, I really was dead—mentally dead. I just didn’t know that I was.

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.

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

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.