Assata Shakur Quotes

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man.

The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.

Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.

Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.

You died. I cried. And kept on getting up. A little slower. And a lot more deadly.

i Believe In The Fire Of Love And The Sweat Of Truth

I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property.

We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.

The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.

Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika's schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.

What kind of justice is this? Where the poor go to prison and the rich go free. Where witnesses are rented, bought, or bribed. Where people are tried not because of any criminal actions but because of their political beliefs.

I believe in living. I believe in birth. I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided him to port.

If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to what’s happening in the world, you’re under no obligation to do anything. But if you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk.

I am about life. I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born.

People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

All you have to do is ask yourselves, who controls the government? And who are the victims of that control?

this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting. we will fight if we are forced to but the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace. we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly. are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger. to sacrifice to end colonialism. to end neo-colonialism. to end racism. to end sexism. r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative. r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy. r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful. r/evolution means protecting the people. the plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet. r/evolution is love.

Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.

Too many people in the U.S. support death and destruction without being aware of it. They indirectly support the killing our people without ever having to look at the corpses

In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.

No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times. If it isn't growing, if it's stagnant, and without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is. That's why political work and organizing are so important. Unless you are addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing positive direction, they'll never support you. The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us.

My energy just couldn’t stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of struggle, and i wanted to dance.

And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information.

Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.

Throughout amerika's history, people have been imprisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal acts in order to justify that imprisonment. Those who have dared to speak out against the injustices in this country, both Black and white, have paid dearly for their courage, sometimes with their lives.

Don’t you know that slavery was outlawed?” “No,” the guard said, “you’re wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons.” I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in a hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions… Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

I had grown up believing the slaves hadn’t fought back. I remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in school.

And, If I know anything at all/Its that a wall is just a wall/And nothing more at all/It can be broken down.

Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well.

Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars.

We do not have the right in the name of social justice to bore anyone to death.

So many of my sisters are so completely unaware of who the real criminals and dogs are. They blame themselves for being hungry; they hate themselves for surviving the best way they know how, to see so much fear, doubt, hurt, and self hatred is the most painful part of being in this concentration camp. "Anyway, in spite of all, i feel a breeze behind my neck, turning to a hurricane and when i take a deep breath I can smell freedom

I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal. As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

from Assata's time cooking at the free breakfast program for kids: One little girl came over to me and tapped me on the back. 'There's something wrong with your pancakes.' 'What's wrong with them?' 'They don't taste good.

They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police, armed only with their belief in justice and their desire for freedom.

I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder.

When i think of how racist, how Eurocentric our so-called education in amerika is, it staggers my mind. And when i think back to some of those kids who were labeled “troublemakers” and “problem students,” i realize that many of them were unsung heroes who fought to maintain some sense of dignity and self-worth.

Everything you love is from a different world. Hungry, you turn your nose up at my peas and rice.

Abraham Lincoln was in no way whatsoever a friend of Black people. He had little concern for our plight. In his famous reply to editor Horace Greeley in August, 1862, he openly stated: My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if i could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.

And I believe that a lost ship/steered by tired, seasick sailors/can still be guided home/to port

But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place.

One little girl broke up the whole kourtroom when she asked out loud, “Is that the fascist pig, Mommy?” pointing up at the judge.

He was the only witness who claimed he could positively identify me, because i “had spent weekends at his house.” But he didn’t know the color of my eyes.

I wondered how i would feel going into some museum and seeing the houses and stolen artifacts of my people stuck away in some exhibition hall. As i spoke i realized that most of the “history” i had been taught about the Indians was probably lies invented by the white man.

Fascist governments do not permit revolutionary or progressive operation groups to exist, no matter how peaceful or nonviolent they are. It doesn't matter whether the fascist government simply outlawed the groups like in Nazi Germany or mounts a counterintelligence campaign to destroy opposition groups like in the U.S.

My neighbors ask me what the u.s. is like, and they accuse me of lying when i tell them about the hunger and cold and people sleeping in the streets. They refuse to believe me. How can that be in such a rich country?

As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.

That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk.

I thought about it all the way home. Of all the things I had wanted to be when i was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn’t one of them.

And i had turned into a crochet fiend. My poor mother was the unfortunate recipient of my early “creations.” Brave, devoted person that she was, she thought they were pure genius.

When the judge learned i was sick and unable to come to kourt, he had a fit. He acted like i had gotten sick just to delay the trial.

It has never ceased to amaze me how so many people can be tricked into hating people who have never done them any harm.

Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.

Many of the sisters were Black and poor and from D.C., where every crime is a violation of a federal statute. They were beautiful sisters, serving outrageous sentences for minor offenses.

I knew i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it. Just like when you’re a little kid and they get you to believe in the bogeyman. You don’t know what the hell the bogeyman is, but you hate him and you’re scared of him.

The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn't working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn't working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich business men owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.

eventually became convinced that the Cuban government was completely committed to eliminating all forms of racism. There were no racist institutions, structures, or organizations, and i understood how the Cuban economic system undermined rather than fed racism.

Fidel, in a speech, had told the people, “We are all Afro-Cubans, from the very lightest to the very darkest.

It wasn’t until later, for instance, that i learned that scalping was an old European custom.

At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

We found out later that a lone Black juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us.

What made me maddest was the media treatment of the BPP, which gave the impression that the Party was racist and violent. And it worked. The pigs would burst into a Panther office, shoot first, and ask questions later. The press always reported that the police had “uncovered” a large arsenal of weapons. Later, when the “arsenal” turned out to be a few legally registered rifles and shotguns, the press never printed a word. The same thing goes on today.

Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set.

CULTURE i must confess that waltzes do not move me. i have no sympathy for symphonies. i guess i hummed the Blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.

Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.

Every time we went to kourt the judge made a point of reading into the record that i had refused to stand up for him. He was one of those racist white dogs who really believed he was massa.

When Angela Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my behalf, the new jersey prosecutor’s office ambushed her and her party, harassing them until the moment they left the state.

i believe in living. i believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. i believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs; And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. i believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. i believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. i believe in life. And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path i have seen the destruction of the daylight and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted i have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. i have walked on cut grass. i have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference i have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. i believe in living i believe in birth. i believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port.

Manhattan Community College had not one course on Peurto Rican history. The Peurto Rican sisters and brothers who knew what was happening became our teachers... once you understand something about the history of a people, their heroes, their hardships, and their sacrifices, it's easier to struggle with them. To support their struggle. For a lot of peole in this country, people who live in other places have no faces. And this is the way the U.S. government wants it to be. They figure as long as the people have no faces and the country has no form, amerikans will not protest when they send in the marines to wipe them out.

I got into heated arguments with brothers and sisters who claimed that the oppression of black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much to figure that black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It would burn me every time some body talked about Black people climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you got a system with a top and bottom, Black people are always going to end up at the bottom because we're easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both the Democratic and Republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in seeing racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing their liberation.

The panel was selected from the voting rolls, and, since candidates running for office seldom represent the interests of Black and poor people, Blacks and the poor don’t vote. But failing to vote means they don’t sit on juries.

A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned about the liberation of Black people, i should quit school and get a job n a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have to work at the factory and organize the workers. When i asked him why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize themselves without any college student doing it for them. Some of these groups would come up with abstract intellectual theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out to the U.S. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Viet Cong how to run their show.

I wondered how all those people in the states who tried to sound tough, saying that the u.s. should go in here, bomb there, take over this, attack that, would feel if they knew that they were indirectly responsible for babies being burned to death.

It was plain to me that we couldn't look to the kourts for freedom and justice anymore than we could expect to gain our liberation by participating in the u.s. political system, and it was pure fantasy to think we could gain them by begging. The only alternative left was to fight for them, and we are going to have to fight like any other people who have fought for liberation.

On May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday, two police had been machine-gunned on Riverside Drive. I felt sorry for their families, sorry for their children, but i was relieved to see that somebody else besides Black folks and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos was being shot at. I was sick and tired of us being the only victims, and i didn’t care who knew it. As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.

Since i was the only Black woman sitting in the defendant’s chair, of course he identified me. We protested the procedure, but the judge admitted his testimony anyway. We finally did arrange for a lineup, and, of course, the other so-called witnesses picked out another woman.

Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don’t know what it feels like to be free. We aren’t free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn’t even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

Hooked up with the nazis were the manson family women, sandra good and linda “squeaky” froame. Sandra had been sentenced to fifteen years for threatening the lives of business executives and government officials, and froame was serving a life sentence for attempting to kill president gerald ford. They were like the Bobbsey twins and clear out of their minds.

But there is no place a defendant in a criminal trial can go to find “experts” in sciences commonly known as “police sciences.” The police can virtually write up a report saying anything they want, and there is no way of refuting it. And there have been cases where “experts” have been double agents: working for a defendant while secretly working with the prosecutor.

The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free. Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika's schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.

Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who has the right line. Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together and organize our own structures and our own politcal party... I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle.

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren’t free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything.

The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares.

It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ... My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me.

Of course, our school was segregated, but the teachers took more of an interest in our lives because they lived in our world, in the same neighborhoods. They knew what we were up against and what we would be facing as adults, and they tried to protect us as much as they could... I'm not saying segregation was a good system. Our schools were inferior. The books were used and torn, handed down from white schools. We received only a fraction of the money allotted to white schools, and the conditions under which many Black children received an education can only be described as horrible. But, Black children encountered support and understanding and encouragement instead of the hostile indifference they often met in the "integrated" schools.

The female guard on duty that night, the slimiest one in the prison, was nowhere in sight. After that, no matter what jail i was in, i always found some way to barricade my cell. In prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled “suicides.” They are usually Black inmates, considered to be a “threat to the orderly running of the prison.” They are usually among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison.

In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem to far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hard hats and the red necks and the bible belt and the so called middle amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine how the "new left" was talking to those people, much less organizing and changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with answers was to on keep studying and struggling. I didn't know how half of what i was studying would fit in but i figured it would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about it because reading that stuff had probably saved my life a million times.

I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can’t find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone would amount to millions.

Nobody back then had ever heard of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) set up by the FBI. Nobody could possibly have known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, “signed” by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton’s leadership. No one could have known that the FBI had sent a letter to Huey’s brother saying the New York Panthers were plotting to kill him. No one could have known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular and the Black Liberation Movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics.

Most of us felt that taking control of our neighborhoods was the first step toward liberation...First, we would take control of the schools; then we would take control of the hospitals; then we would take control of the colleges, the housing, etc., etc. We would have community controlled employment, welfare centers, and city, state, and federal agencies. 'Hold on for a minute,' somebody said. 'Where are y'all gonna get the money to run all that stuff?' 'We'll take community control of the banks,' someone answered. 'You'd better take community control of the army, too, because those banks aren't gonna just let you take their money lying down." 'We'll take control of the political institutions in our community. Then we'll take control of the congressional seats, the senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor's office, and every other office you can take control of. We'll take control of the political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need it.' 'Y'all just wishing and hoping,' someone said. 'You can control the social institutions and the political institutions, but unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can only go so far.