The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.
The task is to transform society; only the people can do that - not heroes, not celebrities, not stars.
You can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.
You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!
Power is the ability to define phenomena, and make it act in a desired manner.
Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim's family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another, until they wear out and give up. this is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their cases. Time is money to poor people. To go to Sacramento means loss of a day's pay - often a loss of job. If this is a democracy, obviously it is a bourgeois democracy limited to the middle and upper classes. Only they can afford to participate in it.
IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us.
White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings.
The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.
During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.
The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.
Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that
Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.
I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.
I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.
We've never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.
You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree's fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down - bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.
You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.
Laws should be made to serve the people. People should not be made to serve the laws.
There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.
Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.
I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.
If you stop struggling, then you stop life.
Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.
Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.
I didn't get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.
My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.
The nature of a panther is that he never attacks. But if anyone attacks or backs into a corner, the panther comes up to wipe that aggressor or that attacker out.
No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.
There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.
Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.
The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.
