by any means necessary

By any means necessary is an English phrase or a translation of a French phrase that has been attributed to at least three famous sources. The earliest of these three sources is French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands. The second is Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon who used the French phrase in his 1960 Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference "Why we use violence".. Later, it entered American popular civil rights culture through a speech given by Malcolm X at the Organization of Afro-American Unity founding rally on June 28, 1964. It is generally considered to mean to leave open the option of all available tactics, strategies or methods for attaining of achieving desired ends, including any form or degree of violence as well as other methods typically considered unethical or immoral. It is part of a broader political idea that radical social change or liberation cannot be obtained by limiting one’s means to that which are considered "acceptable", debatably encapsulated in the suggestion by Audre Lorde that "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house" Jean-Paul Sartre The phrase is also a translation of a sentence used in French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre's 1948 play Dirty Hands: