Assata Shakur
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.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Thinking
A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black family, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation, then he ain't about nothing.Collection: Strong
Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is....never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.Collection: Enemy
Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.Collection: Resistance
Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.Collection: Strong
Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.Collection: Dream
Hip Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people's political and social consciousness. But just as with any weapon, if you don't know how to use it, if you don't know where to point it, or what you're using it for, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot or killing your sisters or brothers.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: War
White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.Collection: Fighting
Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.Collection: Moon
I hate war, and I hate having to struggle. I honestly do because I wish I had been born into a world where it was unnecessary. This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression. Otherwise I would be a sculptor, or a gardener, carpenter - You know, I would be free to be so much more… I guess part of me or a part of who I am, a part of what I do is being a warrior - a reluctant warrior, a reluctant struggler. But I do it, because I’m committed to life.Collection: Hate
Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people's 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.Collection: Freedom
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.Collection: Giving
i Believe In The Fire Of Love And The Sweat Of TruthCollection: Believe
I don't have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating.Collection: People
Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It's really working to create something beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.Collection: Slave
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, sea sick sailors, can still be guided home to portCollection: Believe
The usual way the people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don’t have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.Collection: Thinking
The first part of planning is to believe that you can put that plan into practise.Collection: Believe
I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered . rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.Collection: Men
I think anybody who is honestly struggling against racism must struggle against imperialism and vice versa.Collection: Struggle
I've tried as much as possible to avoid the standard nine-to-five thing. I've tried to organize my life so that I can move around, change the rhythm and the tempo.Collection: Moving
I trust Cuba as a principled country. Cuba's strength is that it has been steadfast in its commitment to the principles of liberation, freedom, of resistance to the kind of institutionalized terrorism that the United States government does every day.Collection: Country
It never occurred to me that anyone would name a nuclear missile "Peacekeeper". It never occurred to me that thousands of people would be killed in the name of "peace-keeping".Collection: Names
I really prefer to be kind of anonymous. Because when people know your whole history, they have a tendency to relate to you differently and maybe put you up on a pedestal. I want people to just be normal with me. I just want to live my life.Collection: People
There's something about approaching 50 that's very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I've been putting off all my life.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Thinking
All of my experience of studying religion, studying spirituality, studying natural healing, traditional medicine, has kind of enriched my vision of the world. Not only seeing reality as this moment, but as a culmination of all of the history behind us, and all of the fruit that hopefully we will be able to grow from the seeds that we are trying to plant, of goodness and peace and beauty and equality.Collection: Healing
For me personally Cuba has been a healing state. When I first got here I had no sense that I had to heal or anything. When you're struggling for your life and you're in the midst of things, you don't feel all the blows.Collection: Struggle
The attitudes of many police organizations were extremely negative to the prospect of Rap, and many officials weren't afraid to say that they were against it. To them, Rappers were just criminals waiting to get caught.Collection: Attitude
Black Revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. We are shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quetin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us.Collection: Ghetto
The US has attacked countries like Grenada, Panama, Libya... the list of victims of US terrorism is almost infinite. And the US government's participation in torture, whether in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile... is well-documented and widely known.Collection: Country
I think that the movement against the World Bank, against the globalization process that is happening, is very positive. We need a globalization, a globalization of people who are committed to social justice, to economic justice. We need a globalization of people who are committed to saving this earth, to making sure that the water is drinkable, that the air is breathable.Collection: Thinking
Tourism has affected Cuba, because tourists come and they bring racist, sexist ideas. They bring a whole vision that there are rich people all over the world and that's the way it should be.Collection: Ideas
I think it's really hard to plan if you don't believe you can implement those plans.Collection: Believe
I must confess that waltzes do not move me, I guess I hummed the blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.Collection: Rain
A lot of contemporary American culture makes its way to this county. Cuba is not some gray, isolated backwater. This is a happening place.Collection: Culture
I had to adjust to living in a Third World country, which means that things people in the U.S. take for granted-like hot running water whenever you turn on the tap-are not always available.Collection: Running
I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day.Collection: People
I think that one of the great things that the Cuban revolution has done is preserve history.Collection: Thinking
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 usCollection: Hate
This planet is a wonderful place, but a vulnerable place.Collection: Wonderful
I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask, those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media, those of you who believe in true freedom, to publish this statement and to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.Collection: Believe
When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.Collection: Children
My life wasn't beautiful and creative before I became politically active. My life was totally changed when I began to struggle.Collection: Beautiful