"...Malcom also sought to enlighten me about the Negro mentality. He repeatedly cautioned me to beware of Negro affirmations of good will toward the white man. He said that the Negro had been trained to dissemble and conceal his real thoughts, as a matter of survival. He argued that the Negro only tells the white man what he believes the white man wishes to hear, and that the art of dissembling reached a point where even Negroes cannot truthfully say they understand what their fellow Negroes believe." P: xi
"I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started school when, something, they would come 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 get what I want. 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 quite, often stayed hungry. So early in life I learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise." P8
"...And knowing that my mother in there was a statistic that didn't have to be, that existed because of a society's failure, hypocrisy, greed, and lack of mercy and compassion. 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" P22
"...and I'd guess that everyone who lived in the house used dope of some kind. This shouldn't reflect too badly on that particular building, because almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.
It was in this house that I learned more about women than I ever did in any other single place. It was these working prostitutes who schooled me to things that every wife and every husband should know. Later on, it was chiefly the women who weren't prostitutes who taught me to be very distrustful of most women; there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than the prostitutes have for pay. And I am talking about black and white. Many of the black ones in those wartime days were right in step with the white ones in having husbands fighting overseas while they were laying up with other men, even giving them their husband's money. And many women just faked as mothers and wives, while playing the field as hard as prostitutes-with their husbands and children right there in New York. " P94
"The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to be mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don't understand it that way, they damage and wreck man's ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That's why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives would keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men.
...everyone in the house laughed about the little Italian fellow whom they called the "Ten Dollar A Minute Man." He came without fail every noontime,...; the joke was he never lasted more than two minutes...but he always left twenty dollars.
Most men, the prostitutes felt, were too easy to push around. Every day these prostitutes heard their customers complaining that they never heard anything but griping from women who were taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men men needed to know what the pimps knew. a woman should be babies enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength." P95
"...I had of course introduced Sophia to my friend Sammy, and we had gone out together some nights. And Sammy and I had thoroughly discussed the black man and white woman psychology. I had Sammy to thank that I was entirely prepared for Sophia's marriage.
Sammy said that white women were very practical; he had heard so many of them express how they felt. They knew that the black man had all the strikes against them, that the white man kept the black man down, under his heel, unable to get anywhere really. The white woman wanted to be comfortable, she wanted to be looked upon with favor by her own kind, but also she wanted to have her pleasure. So some of them just married a white man for convenience and security, and kept right on going with a Negro. It wasn't that they were necessarily in love with the Negro, but they were in love with lust - particularly "taboo" lust." P98
"Sophia always had given me money. Even when I had hundreds if dollars in my pocket, when she came to Harlem I would take everything she had short of her train fare back to Boston. It seems that some women love to be exploited. When they are not exploited, they exploit the man. Anyway, it was his money that she gave me, I guess, because she never had worked...Always, every now and then, I had given her hard time, just to keep her in line. Every once in a while a woman seems to need, in fact wants this, too." P138.
"the social workers worked on us. White women in league with Negroes was their main obsession. The girls weren't so called "tramps," or "trash," they were well-to-do upper-middle-class whites. That bothered the social workers and the forces of the law more than anything else.
How, where, when, had I met them? Did we sleep together? Nobody wanted to know anything at all about the robberies. All they could see was that we had taken the white man's women.
... Later, when I had learned the full truth about the white man, I reflected many times that the average burglary sentence for a first offender, as we all were, was about two years. but we weren't going to get the average - not for our crime.
... But people are always speculating - why I am 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. " P153
"I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book 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 ne 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 on my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of 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. " P176
"For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral positions to accuse anyone else of hate!" P245
"The reporters would try their utmost to raise some "good" white man whom I couldn't refute as such. I'll never forget how one practically lost his voice. He asked me did I feel any white man had ever done anything for the black man in America. I told him, "yes, I can think of two. Hitler and Stalin. the black man in America couldn't get a decent factory job until Hitler put so much pressure on the white man. And then Stalin kept up the pressure .."
".. I was learning under fire how the press, when it wants to, can twist, and slant. If I had said "Mary had a little lamb," what probably would have appeared was "Malcom X Lampoons Mary". " P247
"One thing the white man never can give the black man is self-respect! The black man never can become independent and recognized as a human being who is truly equal with other human beings until he has what they have, and until he is doing for himself what others are doing for themselves." P281
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