One of my favorite books of all time for gaining insight on human nature is the The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley
. It’s got some great insightful quotes, and I’ve decided to phone one in take this time to share some of them. What follows are Malcolm’s views on various issues.
On getting what you want:
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in 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 got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked my why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.?
On competitive strategy:
Mr. Gohannas was close cronies with some other men who, some Saturdays, would take me and Big Boy with them hunting rabbits. I had my father’s .22 caliber rifle; my mother had said it was all right for me to take it with me. The old men had a set rabbit-hunting strategy that they had always used. Usually when a dog jumps a rabbit, and the rabbit gets away, that rabbit will always somehow instinctively run in a circle and return sooner or later past the very spot where he originally was jumped. Well, the old men would just sit and wait in hiding somewhere for the rabbit to come back, then get their shots at him. I got to thinking about it, and finally I thought of a plan. I would separate from them and Big Boy and I would go to a point where I figured that the rabbit, returning, would have to pass me first.
It worked like magic. I began to get three and four rabbits before they got one. The astonishing thing was that none of the old men ever figured out why. They outdid themselves exclaiming what a sure shot I was. I was about twelve, then. All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life, that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business, you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.
On Women:
In Harlem, years later, a friend of mine called Sammy the Pimp taught me something I wish I had know then to look for in Laura’s face. It was what Sammy declared was his infallible clue for determining the “unconscious, true personality” of women. Considering all the women he had picked out of crowds and turned into prostitutes, Sammy qualified as an expert. Anyway, he swore that if a woman, any woman, really gets carried away while dancing, what she truly is at least potentially will surface and show on her face.
On Your Woman’s Exes:
Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell 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.
On Wives And Prostitutes:
Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early [client rush to the brothel]. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their man so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.
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 bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don?t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a 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 could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men…?
I mean, I’d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husband’s ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn?t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands? innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.
On Pimps vs. Husbands:
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 being taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.?
On Black Men And White Women:
From time to time, Sophia [his white girlfriend] would come over to see me from Boston. Even among Harlem Negroes, her looks gave me status. They were just like the Negroes everywhere else. That was why the white prostitutes made so much money. It didn’t make any difference if you were in Lansing, Boston, or New York, what the white racist said, and still says, was right in those days! All you had to do was put a white girl anywhere close to the average black man, and he would respond. The black woman also made the white man’s eyes light up but he was slick enough to hide it.
On Numbers Runners:
West Indian Archie had finished time in Sing Sing not long before I came to Harlem. But my boss’ wife had hired him not just because she knew him from the old days. West Indian Archie had the kind of photographic memory that put him among the elite of numbers runners. He never wrote down your number; even in the case of combination plays, he would just nod. He was able to file all the numbers in his head, and write them down for the banker only when he turned in his money. This made him the ideal runner because cops could never catch him with any betting slips.
I’ve often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black.
On Jews vs. Blacks:
‘Red, I’m a Jew and you’re black,’ [Hymie] would say. ‘These Gentiles don’t like either one of us. If the Jew wasn’t smarter than the Gentile, he’d get treated worse than your people.’
On “Brand Chumps” (vodka anyone?):
‘Another fellow and I would drive out to Long Island where a big bootleg whisky outfit operated. We’d take with us cartons of empty bonded whisky bottles that were saved illegally by bars we supplied. We would buy five-gallon containers of bootleg, funnel it into the bottles, then deliver, according to Hymie’s instructions, this or that many crates back to the bars.
Many people claiming they drank only such-and-such a brand couldn?t tell their only brand apart from pure week-old Long Island bootleg. Most ordinary whisky drinkers are ‘brand’ chumps like this.
More on Women:
I never in my life have seen a black man that loved white women as sincerely as Shorty did. Since I had known him, he had several. He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any women, white or black, seems to get bored with that.
On Mastery:
In every organization, someone must be the boss. If it?s even just one person, you?ve got to be the boss of yourself.
On Prison:
Any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars, caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.
After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds have blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can?t forget those bars.
On Sin and Redemption:
I have since learned, helping me to understand what then began to happen within me, that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus would not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help.
The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth.
On Self-doubt:
[Elijah Muhammed] wrote, ‘If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place. What could make you doubt the truth other than your own weak self?
On Persuasion:
One day, I remember, a dirty glass of water was on a counter and Mr. Muhammed put a clean glass of water beside it. ‘You want to know how to spread my teachings?’ he said, and he pointed to the glasses of water. ‘Don’t condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water,’ he said, ‘just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won’t have to say that yours is better.’
On the Importance of Dependability:
I would rather have a mule I can depend upon than a race horse that I can’t depend upon.
On White Liberals:
The Deep South white press generally blacked me out. But they front-paged what I felt about Northern white and black Freedom Riders going South to ‘demonstrate.’ I called it ‘ridiculous’; their own Northern ghettoes, right at home, had enough rats and roaches to kill to keep all of the Freedom Riders busy. I said that ultra-liberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi. If the Northern Freedom Riders wanted more to do, they could work on the roots of such ghetto evils as the little children out in the streets at midnight, with apartment keys on strings around their necks to let themselves in, and their mothers and fathers drunk, drug addicts, thieves, prostitutes. Or the Northern Freedom Riders could light some fires under the Northern city halls, unions, and major industries to give more jobs to Negroes to remove so many of them from the relief and welfare rolls, which created laziness, and which deteriorated the ghettoes into steadily worse places for humans to live. It was all, it is all, the absolute truth; but what did I want to say it for? Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal.
Yes, I will pull off that liberal’s halo that he spends much time cultivating! The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.
On Muslim Violence:
I knew that no one would kill you quicker than a Muslim if he felt that?s what Allah wanted him to do.
On Northern Blacks vs. Southern Blacks:
There is this to consider: always, the black people have advanced further when they have seen they had to rise up against a system that they clearly saw was outright against them. Under the steady lullabys sung by foxy liberals, the Northern Negro became a beggar. But the Southern Negro, facing the honestly snarling white man, rose up to battle that white man for his freedom?long before it happened in the North.
On Punctuality:
I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious. In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.
On Fear of Failure:
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.
On Regrets About Separatist Views:
Well, I’ve come to regret that incident [where he rebuked the offers of a white college girl to assist the Negro cause, a scene shown in Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie]. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then – like all Muslims – I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me twelve years
Also, concerning the white girl he insulted:
I regret that I told her she could do ‘nothing.’ I wish now that I knew her name, or where I could telephone her, and tell her what I tell white people now when they present themselves as being sincere, and ask me, one way or another, the same thing that she asked.
To learn more about the incident with the little blonde co-ed, click here.
Recommended Reading:
by Norah Vincent (great book, and much more sympathetic to men than you’d expect).
by Mario Puzo:
