The Black Panther Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Yes, we do defend our office as we do defend our homes. This is a constitutional right everybody has, and nothing's funny about that. The only reason they get mad at the Black Panther Party when you do it is for the simple reason that we're political.

Fred Hampton

#3. I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

Kerry Washington

#4. 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

#5. I think because I came into journalism by way of the Black Panther Party - and not J-school or a corporate bourgeois institution - I tried to do news, writing and reporting that had social, political and racial content and context.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

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

Bobby Seale

#7. Tupac the son of the Black Panther, and Tupac the rider. Those are the two people inside of me. I was raised off those ideals.

Tupac Shakur

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

Bobby Seale

#9. Some of the free lunch programs were still goin' on - based on the last leg of the Black Panther Party.

Kool Moe Dee

#10. By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

Alexander Cockburn

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

Bobby Seale

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. My mother was a woman. A black woman. A single mother. Raising two kids on her own. So she was dark skinned. Had short hair. Got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers. So that's why she was a Black Panther.

Tupac Shakur

#16. It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.

Lemony Snicket

#17. There was always music in our home. My mom and my dad loved music. I remember when we were kids we would have these great parties at the house with congas and bongos and African drums, and it was amazing. It wasn't until years later that I found out that they were actually Black Panther meetings.

Queen Latifah

#18. Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#19. I couldn't wait to be, you know, a Black Panther. Of course they wouldn't let me join.

David Alan Grier

#20. Growing up in Chicago, there was a very particular type of home that would display the black Jesus figure. It wasn't a radical home. You wouldn't find these in a Black Panther house. There's still a strong allegiance to Christianity.

Rashid Johnson

#21. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.

Fred Hampton

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

Bobby Seale

#23. 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

#24. Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle. And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.

Rudyard Kipling