Top 180 Assata Shakur Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”

— Assata Shakur

Featured in: Resistance Quotes

2. “Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory.”

— Assata Shakur

3. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

4. “Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.”

— Assata Shakur

5. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

6. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

7. “Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars. But you, me, and tomorrow hold hands and make vows that struggle will multiply. The hacksaw has two blades. The shotgun has two barrels. We are pregnant with freedom. We are a conspiracy.”

— Assata Shakur

8. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

9. “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”

— Assata Shakur

10. “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”

— Assata Shakur

11. “If you’re 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.”

— Assata Shakur

12. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

13. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

14. “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 port.”

— Assata Shakur

15. “Imperialism is the underlying motor of racism. The underlying reason that racism keeps on being promoted in all of its various forms.”

— Assata Shakur

16. “The methods of peaceful protests are not capable of being effective, because in reality most people pay little attention to things that are not abrasive.”

— Assata Shakur

17. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

18. “A woman’s place is in the struggle.”

— Assata Shakur

19. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

20. “Hip Hop can be a very effective way to reach young people and teach them about current political and social issues.”

— Assata Shakur

21. “I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we’re the terrorists. It just doesn’t make sense.”

— Assata Shakur

22. “We’re living in a very tricky world, and unless we become analytical and expose the tricknology, people will become sucked into that. It is very easy, it is very, very easy.”

— Assata Shakur

23. “Freedom! you askin me about freedom. I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, ’cause I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.”

— Assata Shakur

24. “Peace is a rare gift. Peace of mind, peaceful sleeps, and peaceful spirits are all luxuries that few rebels can ever afford.”

— Assata Shakur

25. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

26. “A revolutionary woman can’t have no reactionary man.”

— Assata Shakur

27. “I’ve always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That’s been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person.”

— Assata Shakur

28. “Being in Cuba has allowed me to live in a society that is not at war with itself. There is a sense of community. It’s a given in Cuba that, if you fall down, the person next to you is going to help you get up.”

— Assata Shakur

29. “Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.”

— Assata Shakur

30. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

31. “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.”

— Assata Shakur

32. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

34. “Racism had grown out of slavery and exploitation and was very hard to eradicate quickly and completely.”

— Assata Shakur

35. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

36. “I think that, like many sisters, I was raised to be a Superwoman. I am a serious woman, and I want to be taken seriously.”

— Assata Shakur

37. “To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

— Assata Shakur

38. “The people who are running this planet are insane – they are literally destroying it. I don’t know where they think they’re gonna drink water, breathe air.”

— Assata Shakur

39. “I stay connected in my head. I’m spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change.”

— Assata Shakur

40. “The first part of planning is to believe that you can put that plan into practise.”

— Assata Shakur

41. “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”.”

— Assata Shakur

42. “Before the Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn’t happen, the North went to war.”

— Assata Shakur

43. “When you go through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will look like the hair of another race of people then you are making a statement and the statement is clear.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

45. “I have never really understood exactly what a “liberal” is, though, since i have heard “liberals” express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject.”

— Assata Shakur

46. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

47. “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”

— Assata Shakur

48. “We are pregnant with freedom.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

50. “I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade.”

— Assata Shakur