Top 30 Eldridge Cleaver Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

Featured in: Hard Hitting Quotes

2. “Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

Featured in: Respect Quotes

3. “You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

4. “You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

5. “What we’re saying today is that you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

6. “Too much agreement kills a chat.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

7. “The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

8. “If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

9. “Everybody changes, not just me.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

10. “Every highly successful person is a maniac on a mission. Too much agreement kills a chat.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

11. “All the gods are dead except the god of war.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

12. “There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

13. “The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one’s thing the Revolution.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

14. “The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

Featured in: Strong Quotes

15. “I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

16. “The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

17. “What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

18. “In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

19. “We have dedicated our lives, our blood, to the freedom and liberation of our people, and nothing, no force can stop us from achieving our goal. If it is necessary to destroy the United States of America, then let us destroy it with a smile on our faces.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

20. “With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

21. “The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

22. “The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is whiteblacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

23. “Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

24. “History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

25. “We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

26. “The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

27. “But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

28. “If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

29. “Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

30. “I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

31. “I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

32. “I did not know that I had all these feelings inside me. They have never been aroused before. Now they cascade down upon my head and threaten to beat me down to the ground, into the dust.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

33. “I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats.”

— Eldridge Cleaver

34. “We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.”

— Eldridge Cleaver