Eldridge Cleaver Quotes

Eldridge Cleaver presents bold, gritty commentary on America, belief and power that reads like a rallying call.

21 quotes

1. 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.

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

3. All the gods are dead except the god of war.

4. 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.

5. CNN Obituary

6. PBS Frontline Interview with Eldridge Cleaver

7. Reason Magazine Interview with Eldridge Cleaver

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

9. 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.

10. 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.

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

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

13. The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white... blacks 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.

14. 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.

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

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

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

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

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