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Eldridge Cleaver quotes
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
Eldridge Cleaver
If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
Eldridge Cleaver
You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver
We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.
Eldridge Cleaver
Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.
Eldridge Cleaver
Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.
Eldridge Cleaver
They were murderers and they still are, but policemen are like dogs on a leash.... The police function under political direction. They go after whoever they are sent after, and that's where the problem comes in.... Black people were moving out of their traditional position in America. Nobody knew what to do about it. The white politicians were confused, the blacks were confused.... the police were told to go out, stop those civil-rights marches ... and they went out and did that. When you talk to police now who participated in that, you find out that they were in the same position we were in - just trying to find the right formula.
Eldridge Cleaver
We would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence. I did that personally in the case I was involved in.... We went after the cops that night, but when we got caught we said they came after us. We always did that. When you talk about the legacy of the '60s, that's one legacy. That's what I try to address, because it helped to distort the image of the police, but I've come to the point where I realize that our police department is necessary.
Eldridge Cleaver
I can understand J. Edgar Hoover, because he wasn't inaccurate.... He said that we were the main threat. We were trying to be the main threat. We were trying to be the vanguard organization. J. Edgar Hoover was an adversary, but he had good information. We were plugged into all of the revolutionary groups in America, plus those abroad. We were working hand-in-hand with communist parties here and around the world, and he knew that.
Eldridge Cleaver
There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.
Eldridge Cleaver
Too much agreement kills a chat.
Eldridge Cleaver
It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat.
Eldridge Cleaver
The police department and the armed forces are the two arms of the power structure, the muscles of control and enforcement. They have deadly weapons with which to inflict pain on the human body. They know how to bring about hirrble deaths. They have clubs with which to beat the body and the head. They have bullets and guns with which to tear holes in the flesh, to smash bones, to disable and kill. They use force, to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do.
Eldridge Cleaver
The fight against the Negro revolution, as long as this was possible, was waged in the name of the flag and the Constitution. Now, in this new stage of the struggle, the opposition is again employing as weapons the very same tools with which they have once been defeated.
Eldridge Cleaver
Americans are becoming increasingly polarized right and left, with the great body of the people in the middle confused and, sometimes to mask their confusion, feigning indifference.
Eldridge Cleaver
Five years ago, even the most audacious visionary would not have dared predict the slashing do-or-de desperation and the sizzling up-tempo beat which has exploded into our politics, into our daily conversation, and into our nightmares and dreams.
Eldridge Cleaver
In economics, because everybody seemed to find it necessary to attack and condemn Karl Marx in their writings, I sought out his book, and although he kept me with a headache, I took him my authority. I was not prepared to understand him, but I was able to see in him a thoroughgoing critique of and condemnation of capitalism. It was like taking medicine for me to find that, indeed, American capitalism deserved all th hatred and contempt that I felt for it in my heart.
Eldridge Cleaver
I had come to believe that there is no God; if there is, men do not know anything about him. Therefore, all religions were phony - which made all preachers and priests, in our eyes, fakers, including the ones scurrying around the prison who, curiously, could put in a good word for you with the Almighty Creator of the universe but could not get anything down with the warden or parole board - they could usher you through the Pearly Gates after you were dead, but not through the prison gate while you were still alive and kicking.
Eldridge Cleaver
You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Eldridge Cleaver
I cannot help to say that Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind. Huey Newton is a classical revolutionary figure.
Eldridge Cleaver
Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
Eldridge Cleaver
I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.
Eldridge Cleaver
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