Malcolm X is best remembered as an activist, but he was also a profound thinker and communicator – the ultimate subversive.  He constantly questioned the system and how it could be challenged to increase freedom.  Read on to see Malcolm X’s thoughts about freedom, power and transformation.

Freedom

You can’t separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire… or preserve his freedom.

Anytime you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourself.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

Power

Power never takes a back step — only in the face of more power.

So early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what is yours?

Transformation

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.

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.

Why am I 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.

It’s good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you’ve heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you”ll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you”ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.

Times change so quickly that if you and I don’t keep up with the times, we’ll find ourselves with an umbrella in our hand, over our head, when the sun is out. Or we’ll find ourselves standing in the rain, with the umbrella inside the door.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your — your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.

Tags: freedom, slavery, subversive, the system

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