Eldridge Cleaver Quotes

“If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

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

— 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

“And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be 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

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

“Ah, what sights and sounds and pain lie beneath that mist. And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful, sunlit place
but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins. But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a New City on these ruins.”

— 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

“You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver”

— 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

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

Too much agreement kills a chat.

— Eldridge Cleaver

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

— 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

“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

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

“All the gods are dead except the god of war.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

“Everybody changes, not just me.”

— 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

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

“I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

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

— 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 on the books.”

— 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

“Every highly successful person is a maniac on a mission. Too much agreement kills a chat”

— Eldridge Cleaver

“The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

“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

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

— 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

“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

“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

“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 know that the black man's sick attitude toward the white woman is
a revolutionary sickness: it keeps him perpetually out of harmony with the
system that is oppressing him. Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the Negro male's
lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an esthetic attraction,
but nothing could be further from the truth. His motivation is often of such
a bloody, hateful, bitter, and malignant nature that whites would really
be hard pressed to find it flattering.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

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

— Eldridge Cleaver

“If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him”

— Eldridge Cleaver

“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