Top 180 Assata Shakur Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

102. “People come telling the truth. When I ask how thing are in the States, they don’t give me the okeydoke. They say, “Honey, things are hard.” It reminds me I have to keep struggling.”

— Assata Shakur

103. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

104. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

105. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

106. “It seemed that most women, because they had been caught, gave up on the movement and were just trying to pass the time until they could be released. Men in prison struggled to maintain their pride, including their manhood, because that is all they had left after everything had been taken away.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

108. “Like all other Black revolutionaries, Amerika is trying to lynch me.”

— Assata Shakur

109. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

111. “How lovely it is to live with a sense of community. To live where you can drop in the street and a million people will come and help you.”

— Assata Shakur

112. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

113. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

114. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

115. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

116. “I think that spirituality is important for all people to develop. I don’t mean there necessarily has to be a religious aspect to spirituality. Some people are spiritual in a religious way, other people are spiritual in their work and in their art and in their treatment of other people.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

118. “I really wanted to know what happens in a place that is trying to build socialism, that’s trying to construct some form of social justice. That’s trying to feed people, to make health care and education a right.”

— Assata Shakur

119. “Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.”

— Assata Shakur

120. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

121. “I have been a political activist most of my life and many groups have attempted to label me as a criminal because of my outspoken beliefs. I am not a criminal and I have never been one.”

— Assata Shakur

122. “My experience in the United States was living in a society that was very much at war with itself, that was very alienated. People felt not part of a community, but like isolated units that were afraid of interaction, of contact, that were lonely.”

— Assata Shakur

123. “The U. S. is becoming more hostile to Black people and other people of color. Racism is running rampant and xenophobia is on the rise.”

— Assata Shakur

124. “There is a down side to everything if you don’t understand what the consequences of what you are saying in your music you could possibly end up getting yourself killed or hurting other people because of your carelessness.”

— Assata Shakur

125. “Acquittal. The kourtroom broke into a loud cheer. The judge just gave up calling for order. He had to wait for the shouting to die down. It was a long time coming. All the spectators were jumping around hugging each other. The marshals led me out of the courtroom and handcuffed me. They brought me back to Rikers Island where i was put into solitary confinement.”

— Assata Shakur

126. “I was taken to Elmhurst Hospital in a motorcade. It looked to me like a million police cars buzzing around the vehicle in which i, a woman in labor, was riding. And they all followed. Into Elmhurst Hospital and up to the delivery room. They surrounded the hospital.”

— Assata Shakur

127. “A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world.”

— Assata Shakur

128. “To avoid being manhandled, as soon as the judge said, “Remove the defendant from the courtroom,” i would say, “The defendant will remove herself.” Most of the time it worked, but one day the marshals were so gung ho they jumped on me and started brutalizing me in open kourt.”

— Assata Shakur

129. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

130. “The capper came when the manager of the bank came forward to testify in my behalf. He said that i was definitely not the woman who robbed the bank and that the robber was a different height and weight from mine.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

133. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

134. “No one i knew had ever heard of Ronald Myers, and no one understood why he had been targeted for this particular frame-up. In fact, i wondered if he was some kind of plant. It all seemed so strange.”

— Assata Shakur

135. “I think it’s really hard to plan if you don’t believe you can implement those plans.”

— Assata Shakur

136. “I worked, studied, mothered and continued to be an activist. I found that Cuba was much different from the US; its government was genuinely trying to erase racism.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

138. “Whenever a juror said something that revealed out-and-out prejudice, the judge would try to clean it up.”

— Assata Shakur

139. “I think that one of the great things that the Cuban revolution has done is preserve history.”

— Assata Shakur

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

— Assata Shakur

141. “She made one mistake,” he kept repeating. “She forgot to change her earrings. She has the same earrings on.” The prosecutor was so dramatic. The scene was straight out of the movies. You could tell he had been watching the late show. Both the woman in the bank and i had on hoop earrings. When Stanley summed up, he just said, “Will all the women in the courtroom who have on hoop earrings, please stand up?” Half the women rose to their feet.”

— Assata Shakur

142. “This planet is a wonderful place, but a vulnerable place.”

— Assata Shakur

143. “They lock you in the hole and they don’t let you out until you consent to be searched internally.”

— Assata Shakur

144. “They don’t have a case,” Bob said. “I don’t even know how they got an indictment.” “We know,” Kamau and i said. “Their case is utterly absurd,” Evelyn said. “We know,” Kamau and i droned again. “Their witnesses are as phony as three-dollar bills,” Evelyn said. “We know.” “They don’t have one piece of physical evidence,” Evelyn ranted. “No photographs, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no nothing.” “We know,” Kamau and i chanted in unison.”

— Assata Shakur

145. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

146. “The US government’s most acute fear is that other countries are going to follow the Cuban example. They want everybody to know that if you follow this example we will attack you in every way that we can.”

— Assata Shakur

147. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

148. “He said he had a plan, something he wanted to check out, but he didn’t want to discuss it and raise my hopes prematurely. That was the last time i saw Stanley Cohen.”

— Assata Shakur

149. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

150. “I couldn’t see how we could seriously struggle without having a strong sense of collectivity, without being responsible FOR each other and TO each other.”

— Assata Shakur