Top 180 Assata Shakur Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set.”

— Assata Shakur

152. “He was the only witness who claimed he could positively identify me, because i “had spent weekends at his house.” But he didn’t know the color of my eyes.”

— Assata Shakur

153. “I think that one of the problems that exists in the United States and in many places in the world is that people don’t believe that they can make a difference. So a lot of times we’re defeated before we even start. We’ve become consumers of a world vision, of Kentucky Fried Chicken, of McDonalds.”

— Assata Shakur

154. “When Angela Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my behalf, the new jersey prosecutor’s office ambushed her and her party, harassing them until the moment they left the state.”

— Assata Shakur

155. “I think that people who want to change this planet have to seriously understand that as human beings we have to work to be good.”

— Assata Shakur

156. “They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police, armed only with their belief in justice and their desire for freedom.”

— Assata Shakur

157. “I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the liberation of our people. 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. Skakur means ’the thankful.”

— Assata Shakur

158. “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

159. “When I was a child, if someone had talked to me about buying water, I would have thought it was a joke.”

— Assata Shakur

160. “That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk.”

— Assata Shakur

161. “After a while, many of the whites asked to be excused before Evelyn even asked them any questions. Most of them preferred to be excused rather than have their feelings toward Black people, Black militants, and Black Panthers questioned and explored.”

— Assata Shakur

162. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

163. “When i heard on the radio that the New York Panthers had been busted, i was furious. The so-called conspiracy charges were so stupid that even a fool could see through them. The police actually had the audacity to charge them with plotting to blow up the flowers in the Botanical Garden.”

— Assata Shakur

164. “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.”

— Assata Shakur

165. “It turned out that he was a specialist in paleontology and had spent a lot of time studying rocks. He tried to claim that his expertise at examining rocks made him able to identify people. Under cross-examination, all his carefully constructed “expertise” turned into a pile of rocks, and this new technical breakthrough in crime fighting proved to be nothing but a fraud.”

— Assata Shakur

166. “I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty – that’s positive.”

— Assata Shakur

167. “Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.”

— Assata Shakur

168. “A lot of contemporary American culture makes its way to this county. Cuba is not some gray, isolated backwater. This is a happening place.”

— Assata Shakur

169. “Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don’t know what it feels like to be free. We aren’t free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn’t even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.”

— Assata Shakur

170. “I realized that I was connected to Africa.”

— Assata Shakur

171. “It has never ceased to amaze me how so many people can be tricked into hating people who have never done them any harm.”

— Assata Shakur

172. “I found that people had all kinds of levels of consciousness, all kinds of levels of education, but that Cubans in general were very educated politically. I could go sit in a bus and get into a conversation with someone and that person had a wealth of knowledge. And energy!”

— Assata Shakur

173. “It sometimes seems that people in the states are so accustomed to watching death on “Eyewitness News,” watching people starve to death in Africa, being tortured to death in Latin America or shot down on Asian streets, that, somehow, for them, people across the ocean – people “up there” or “down there” or “over there” – are not real.”

— Assata Shakur

174. “My fantasy of Cuba was that everybody was going to be going around looking like Fidel, with green uniforms – and it was very different from my vision of how Cuba was going to be.”

— Assata Shakur

175. “Several years later, after the Freedom of Information Act was passed, it was revealed that Cotton had been working undercover for the police.”

— Assata Shakur

176. “Northern whites were more than happy at the prospect of Black people fighting in the war. A popular verse published in the newspapers of the day reflected the sentiment of many Northerners: Some say it is a burnin’ shame To make the naygurs fight An’ that the trade o’ bein’ kilt Belongs but to the white; But as for me upon me sowl, So liberal are we here, I’ll let Sambo be murthered in place o’ meself On every day in the year.”

— Assata Shakur

177. “Even though the National Jury Project had done a study of Middlesex County and had found that eighty-three percent of the people had heard about my case in the media and seventy percent had already formulated an opinion about my guilt, the kourt maintained that i could receive a fair trial.”

— Assata Shakur

178. “Fidel, in a speech, had told the people, “We are all Afro-Cubans, from the very lightest to the very darkest.”

— Assata Shakur

179. “At this moment, I am not so concerned about myself. Everybody has to die sometime, and all I want is to go with dignity.”

— Assata Shakur

180. “I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It’s kind of funny when i think about it, because reading all that stuff probably has saved my life a million times.”

— Assata Shakur

181. “The only great people i have met have been modest and humble. You can’t claim that you love people when you don’t respect them, and you can’t call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships. And that doesn’t happen out of nowhere. That’s something that has got to be put into practice every day.”

— Assata Shakur

182. “Another pig comes in. A Black pig. In uniform. He comes closer and i see that he is not a cop but a hospital security guard. He stands not too far from where i am lying and i can see he is not at all hostile. His face breaks into a kind of reserved smile and, very discreetly, he clenches his fist and gives me the power sign. That man will never know how much better he made me feel at that moment.”

— Assata Shakur

183. “Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting together against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who had the right line.”

— Assata Shakur

184. “After ten days, i was discharged from the hospital over the objections of my doctor, brought to the middlesex county jail for men, and kept in solitary confinement from February 1974 until May 1974.”

— Assata Shakur

185. “One of the worst cases is that of ASSATA SHAKUR, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.”

— Assata Shakur

186. “Once you’re in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don’t want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions.”

— Assata Shakur

187. “The one thing we do know is that after his death, all the legal papers on my case came up missing. Evelyn talked to Phyllis, Stanley’s widow, and she gave her every legal paper she could find that had something to do with my case, but the bulk of the material was still missing. Finally, Evelyn found out that the New York City police had my legal papers. “How did they get them?” i asked her. “I don’t even want to think about it,” she answered.”

— Assata Shakur

188. “To win we have got to wear down our oppressors, little by little, and at the same time, strengthen our forces, slowly but surely.”

— Assata Shakur

189. “I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.”

— Assata Shakur

190. “The prospective jurors in the jury room were talking about the case, although they had been ordered not to discuss it. The judge asked what they were saying. “They say she’s guilty.”

— Assata Shakur

191. “An aboveground political organization can’t wage guerrilla war anymore than an underground army can do aboveground political work. Although the two must work together, they must have completely separate structures, and any links between the two must remain secret.”

— Assata Shakur

192. “I have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know any thing at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.”

— Assata Shakur

193. “Anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom, because we are the easiest to discriminate against. That’s why i couldn’t see fighting within the system.”

— Assata Shakur

194. “Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery.”

— Assata Shakur

195. “I will never forget the haunting scream of that child as she watched her father being brutally beaten.”

— Assata Shakur

196. “Just because you believe in self-defense doesn’t mean you let yourself be sucked into defending yourself on the enemy’s terms.”

— Assata Shakur

197. “They refused to let him examine me unless a white doctor, hired by the state, was present, and for the report to the judge, the white doctor had to examine me.”

— Assata Shakur

198. “I’m not quite sure what freedom is, but I damn know well what it ain’t. How have we gotten so silly, I wonder. I get back off into Baldwin. I don’t give a damn if Sag Harbor sags into oblivion. Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is more real than this reality.”

— Assata Shakur