Eldridge Cleaver: But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting rel...

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

Eldridge Cleaver

justice teacher people

Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.

Eldridge Cleaver

respect given inspirational

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

greatness kindness love

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

Eldridge Cleaver

black-history idaho life

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

Eldridge Cleaver

decided force use

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

Eldridge Cleaver

forgiveness hate love

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.

Eldridge Cleaver

land blood years

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

usa struggle dream

The most revolutionary statement in history is "Love thine enemy

Eldridge Cleaver

statements revolutionary enemy

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.

Eldridge Cleaver

pain white men

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.

Eldridge Cleaver

blood america people

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

Eldridge Cleaver

manhood gains earth

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.

Eldridge Cleaver

problem struggle people

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

greatness self loss

Every highly successful person is a maniac on a mission. Too much agreement kills a chat

Eldridge Cleaver

life-and-love successful agreement

I know that the black man's sick attitude toward the white woman is

Eldridge Cleaver

motivation girl dream

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

Eldridge Cleaver

creation rights gone

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

swings cutting life

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

fake order people

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

Eldridge Cleaver

champion powerful america

But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.