Eldridge Cleaver Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.

Eldridge Cleaver
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
In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy man's need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense.

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

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

Eldridge Cleaver
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.

Eldridge Cleaver
I crossed the tracks and sought out White prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically [...] Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man's law [...] and that I was defiling his women.

Eldridge Cleaver
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
Rape was an insurrectionary act.... I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.

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
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
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
It's been said that today, you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem. There is no more middle ground.

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

Eldridge Cleaver
I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other. I do not want to "hold" you, I want you to "stay" out of your own need for me.

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

Eldridge Cleaver
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 in the books.

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

Eldridge Cleaver
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
I, for one, do not think homosexuality is the latest advance over heterosexuality in the scale of human evolution. Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become head of General Motors.

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