Eldridge Cleaver Quotes

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

They use force, to make you do, what the deciders, have decided you must do.

You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one’s thing the Revolution.