Top 180 Assata Shakur Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade.”

— Assata Shakur

52. “I can’t do nothin except try to find cloud nine.”

— Assata Shakur

53. “If we are not committed to saving this earth we will be buying designer air filters and gas masks with little Nike swishes on them.”

— Assata Shakur

54. “I believe in self-defense and self-determination for Africans and other oppressed people in America.”

— Assata Shakur

55. “People think that in order for something to work, it has to be complicated, but a lot of times the opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice.”

— Assata Shakur

56. “We had to learn that we’re beautiful. We had to relearn something forcefully taken from us. We had to learn about Black power. People have power if we unite. We learned the importance of coming together and being active.”

— Assata Shakur

57. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

58. “The real reason Cuba poses a threat has nothing to do with my being here or anyone else being here. It’s because Cuba is an example of a country that is actively fighting against imperialist domination and insists on its own right to self-determination and sovereignty.”

— Assata Shakur

59. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

60. “I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means “She who struggles,” Olugbala means “Love for the people,” and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful.”

— Assata Shakur

61. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

62. “We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice.”

— Assata Shakur

63. “I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary change.”

— Assata Shakur

64. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

65. “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 privileges, then they are “liberals.” 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.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

67. “I miss friends and family. If it weren’t for visits from old friends and other African Americans I meet who come to Cuba, I’d probably be in some kind of time warp.”

— Assata Shakur

68. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

69. “I’m not quite sure what freedom is, but I know damn well what it ain’t.”

— Assata Shakur

70. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

71. “Are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger? To sacrifice to end colonialism? To end neo-colonialism? To end racism? To end sexism?”

— Assata Shakur

72. “Nobody could have possibly 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’s cointelpro was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular, and the Black Liberation movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics.”

— Assata Shakur

73. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

74. “I think that the greatest betrayal that a revolutionary can participate in is to become like the people you are struggling against. To become like your persecutors. I think that is a betrayal and a sin.”

— Assata Shakur

75. “I think that in order to struggle you have to be creative. In my life, creativity has been something that has sustained me; it awoke my spiritual struggle.”

— Assata Shakur

76. “The government recognized immediately that Rap music has enormous revolutionary potential and politicians immediately came together to end it.”

— Assata Shakur

77. “Every day there were three shifts of police. When they changed shifts, the two troopers would salute the sergeant. Some saluted an army salute, but others saluted like the nazis did in Germany. They held their hands in front of them and clicked their heels.”

— Assata Shakur

78. “Wear your scars like jewelry cause they were bought with blood.”

— Assata Shakur

79. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

80. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

81. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

82. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

83. “When the draft law was enacted, tens of thousands of white workers in New York City took to the streets and brutally beat and murdered every Black person they could find. It has been estimated that between four hundred and a thousand Blacks were killed as a result of the so-called New York draft law riots. Draft riots and the murder of Blacks also took place in other Northern cities.”

— Assata Shakur

84. “In my case, spirituality has been important to me because at periods in my life there’s been very little else that I’ve had going. I’ve actually needed to call on, to feel the forces of good in this universe to be able to survive.”

— Assata Shakur

85. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

86. “It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by itself – Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. 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.”

— Assata Shakur

87. “On the first day of the arts and crafts class i had nothing really prepared, so i asked everyone to draw themselves. When i looked at the drawings i felt faint. All of the students were Black, yet the drawings depicted a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed little white children. I was horrified.”

— Assata Shakur

88. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

89. “My life wasn’t beautiful and creative before I became politically active. My life was totally changed when I began to struggle.”

— Assata Shakur

90. “Cuba has its own moral system and priorities. That’s what keeps it going, the belief that the country can control its own destiny.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

92. “One sticks his fingers in my eyes. I don’t know what he has on his fingertips, but whatever it is burns like hell. I think I am gonna be blind forever. He says he will keep doing it until i am completely blind.”

— Assata Shakur

93. “Later that day, Ray Brown and Evelyn came to see me. Ray was in a jovial mood, laughing his head off. “Well, you’ve really done it this time. I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. His honor is going to give you a strong reprimand for getting pregnant during his trial.”

— Assata Shakur

94. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

95. “What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.”

— Assata Shakur

96. “The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody.”

— Assata Shakur

97. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

98. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

99. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

100. “I think anybody who is honestly struggling against racism must struggle against imperialism and vice versa.”

— Assata Shakur