Sublime

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

Seek ambition. Hire character. Train talent.

John Macdonald (1741–96), a Scottish Highlander, was a famous footman who wrote memoirs of his experiences in service. An orphan who had been sacked from a previous job rocking a baby’s cradle, Macdonald found work in a gentleman’s house turning the spit. He was aged just five.

We took apart passages from Malcolm’s book. We defined terms like definitions, axioms, postulates, and previously proved theorems. We argued over how these should be applied to Malcolm’s statements.

He crept out of bed at night and read by a small crack of light that reached his cell floor, sneaking back to bed once an hour as the guard passed. In this painstaking way, Malcolm Little spent years educating himself.

Patrick Mc-Kenzie, a writer, entrepreneur, and software business expert who is best known for a 2012 post on salary negotiation

Quand un journaliste a demandé à Malcolm quelle était son alma mater, il a répondu : « Les livres. » La prison a été son école. Il a transcendé sa détention par les pages qu’il avalait. Pour lui, ces mois ont passé sans qu’il pense au fait qu’il était détenu contre son gré. Il n’avait « jamais été aussi libre de sa vie ».

Instead, he and his three key partners advocated and practiced a policy of plowing large percentages of profits directly back into the property, knowing that the best defense against invading railroads was a better-built system that could operate at lower rates.