Bobby Seale Quotes

#1. To develop political and economic power in a capitalist society, you need capital.

Bobby Seale

#2. There is an entire generation of young people who know nothing about how viciously the FBI attacked The Black Panther Party, and why.

Bobby Seale

#3. Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

Bobby Seale

#4. All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

Bobby Seale

#5. I have quite a few good friends in Philadelphia who were police officers.

Bobby Seale

#6. You can't call yourself a university and exclude whole ethnic groups.

Bobby Seale

#7. Electoral politics was always an objective of the Black Panther party, so Barack Obama is a part of what we dreamed and struggled and died for.

Bobby Seale

#8. The people have now come to realize that the only way to deal with the oppressor is to deal on our own terms and this was done.

Bobby Seale

#9. The Black Panther Party were not revenge nationalists.

Bobby Seale

#10. I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

Bobby Seale

#11. There's nothing wrong with being a cop. There's nothing wrong with being a white person. It's about where your heart is ... We've got to get everyone beyond the xenophobic isolationism.

Bobby Seale

#12. I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights.

Bobby Seale

#13. Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. That's what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.

Bobby Seale

#14. I'm a progressive. The progression has to be manifested in a new direction in policies and legislation.

Bobby Seale

#15. On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.

Bobby Seale

#16. The FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program would work hand-in-hand with police departments, literally planning attacks on Black Panther Party offices throughout the United States of America. They did this over a period of time.

Bobby Seale

#17. If they had not murdered Malcolm X, there probably never would have been a Black Panther Party.

Bobby Seale

#18. The Black Panther party of Self-Defense is a revolutionary party.

Bobby Seale

#19. We were like heroes, to stand there and observe the police, and the police were scared to move upon us.

Bobby Seale

#20. I'm going to have to call up Spike Lee. I did a cameo for him in 'Malcolm X,' and I'm trying to get him to do my life story and the history of the Black Panther Party.

Bobby Seale

#21. We were not talking about the average white person: we was talking about the corporate money rich and the racist jive politicians and the lackeys, as we used to call them, for the government who perpetuate all this exploitation and racism.

Bobby Seale

#22. I'm still a political revolutionary. The fire never went out of me, but perceptions and realizations change.

Bobby Seale

#23. We're hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?

Bobby Seale

#24. They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.

Bobby Seale

#25. I think I can capture the taste buds of the average right-wing conservative who loves barbecue.

Bobby Seale

#26. I think the American Dream should be about a greater progressive legislation that allows for what I call a necessary future world of cooperational humanism.

Bobby Seale

#27. I always tried to raise money for the Black Panthers through business schemes.

Bobby Seale

#28. Lots of people think I went to prison. I never went to prison. I was in jail without bail.

Bobby Seale

#29. The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.

Bobby Seale

#30. My father was a master carpenter and builder. Architectural design, engineering design, mechanical design, three-dimensional views, that was my shtick, my forte.

Bobby Seale

#31. The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution!

Bobby Seale

#32. I like Barack Obama.

Bobby Seale

#33. When donors visited the Black Panther Party, they came and saw our real programs, a real clinic, with real doctors and medics, giving service to people.

Bobby Seale

#34. Money is the medium of exchange, and it's how you make things happen. To say you hate it is some farfetched, idealistic crap.

Bobby Seale

#35. Our position was: If you don't attack us, there won't be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.

Bobby Seale

#36. People called me a hoodlum and a thug. But they didn't tell you I was a carpenter, an architect, a stand-up comic - even a bartender. And a barbecue cook. But they didn't tell you that.

Bobby Seale

#37. The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people. We didn't want to give a long dissertation.

Bobby Seale

#38. The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

Bobby Seale

#39. But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party- whose members for the most part come from the ghetto- seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.

Bobby Seale

#40. Huey was something else. Huey was out of sight. He knew how to do it. Huey was ten motherfuckers.

Bobby Seale

#41. You don't fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.

Bobby Seale

#42. I am not a hoodlum. I'm a community organizer.

Bobby Seale

#43. Fox News never calls up Bobby Seale to articulate a stance in opposition to right-wing conservatives. To me, giving the New Black Panthers a platform on Fox is a subtle tactic to scare people.

Bobby Seale

#44. We don't hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!

Bobby Seale

#45. A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere ... the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.

Bobby Seale