Eldridge Cleaver Quotes

#1. We always had a central committee. They were mesmerized by Eldridge Cleaver.

Huey Newton

#2. Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He

John Updike

#3. You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver)

Gordon Parks

#4. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver

Eldridge Cleaver

#5. I don't want people to think he [Eldridge Cleaver] is so important - our party is important because our party works for the people and no individual is important in our party, including myself.

Huey Newton

#6. We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.

Eldridge Cleaver

#7. What we're saying today is that you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

#8. Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.

Eldridge Cleaver

#9. The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is whiteblacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.

Eldridge Cleaver

#10. You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

Eldridge Cleaver

#11. I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, 'push myself forward like a train.

Eldridge Cleaver

#12. 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

#13. We have dedicated our lives, our blood, to the freedom and liberation of our people, and nothing, no force can stop us from achieving our goal. If it is necessary to destroy the United States of America, then let us destroy it with a smile on our faces.

Eldridge Cleaver

#14. Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.

Eldridge Cleaver

#15. Too much agreement kills a chat.

Eldridge Cleaver

#16. If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him

Eldridge Cleaver

#17. The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

Eldridge Cleaver

#18. Every time I embrace a black woman I'm embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I'm hugging freedom. The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death ... . I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed.

Eldridge Cleaver

#19. The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

#20. 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

#21. With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.

Eldridge Cleaver

#22. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

#23. What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.

Eldridge Cleaver

#24. 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

#25. Every highly successful person is a maniac on a mission. Too much agreement kills a chat

Eldridge Cleaver

#26. If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.

Eldridge Cleaver

#27. I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.

Eldridge Cleaver

#28. The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.

Eldridge Cleaver

#29. I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.

Eldridge Cleaver

#30. But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.

Eldridge Cleaver

#31. The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

Eldridge Cleaver

#32. All the gods are dead except the god of war.

Eldridge Cleaver

#33. I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.

Eldridge Cleaver

#34. In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Eldridge Cleaver

#35. 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

#36. History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

Eldridge Cleaver

#37. Everybody changes, not just me.

Eldridge Cleaver