The vibration signals resulting from rolling bearings are nonlinear and nonstationary, and an approach for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings using the quantile permutation entropy and EMD (empirical mode decomposition) is proposed. Firstly, the EMD is used to decompose the rolling bearings vibration signal, and several IMFs (intrinsic mode functions) spanning different scales are obtained. Secondly, aiming at the shortcomings of the permutation entropy algorithm, a new permutation entropy algorithm based on sample quantile is proposed, and the quantile permutation entropy of the first few IMFs, which contain the main fault information, is calculated. The quantile permutation entropies are accordingly seen as the characteristic vector and then input to the particle swarm optimization and support vector machine. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the experimental data. The analysis results show that the proposed approach can effectively achieve fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.