Best Quotes by Eldridge Cleaver (Top 10)
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You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Eldridge Cleaver
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Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
Eldridge Cleaver
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The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
Eldridge Cleaver
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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
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You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver
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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
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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
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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
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We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.
Eldridge Cleaver
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What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.
Eldridge Cleaver
More Eldridge Cleaver Quotes
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Too much agreement kills a chat.
Eldridge Cleaver
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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
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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
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History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.
Eldridge Cleaver
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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
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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
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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
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In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Eldridge Cleaver
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All the gods are dead except the god of war.
Eldridge Cleaver
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What we're saying today is that you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem
Eldridge Cleaver
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If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him
Eldridge Cleaver