Top 50 Huey Newton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.”

— Huey Newton

2. “If you stop struggling, then you stop life.”

— Huey Newton

3. “Power is the ability to define phenomena, and make it act in a desired manner.”

— Huey Newton

4. “The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.”

— Huey Newton

5. “Laws should be made to serve the people. People should not be made to serve the laws.”

— Huey Newton

6. “You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!”

— Huey Newton

7. “The task is to transform society; only the people can do that – not heroes, not celebrities, not stars.”

— Huey Newton

8. “Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.”

— Huey Newton

9. “Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.”

— Huey Newton

10. “You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.”

— Huey Newton

11. “My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.”

— Huey Newton

12. “You can Jail a Revolutionary but you can’t jail the Revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country, but you can’t run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation.”

— Huey Newton

13. “Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.”

— Huey Newton

14. “I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.”

— Huey Newton

15. “We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.”

— Huey Newton

16. “By surrendering my life to the revolution, I found eternal life.”

— Huey Newton

17. “My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.”

— Huey Newton

18. “I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.”

— Huey Newton

19. “Let us go on outdoing ourselves; a revolutionary man always transcends himself or otherwise he is not a revolutionary man, so we always do what we ask of ourselves or more than what we know we can do.”

— Huey Newton

20. “I would like to add I’m innocent. I am not guilty.”

— Huey Newton

21. “The racist dog policemen must withdraw immediately from our communities, cease their wanton murder and brutality and torture of black people, or face the wrath of the armed people.”

— Huey Newton

22. “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”

— Huey Newton

23. “I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.”

— Huey Newton

24. “Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.”

— Huey Newton

25. “Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite.”

— Huey Newton

26. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.”

— Huey Newton

27. “The rest of the Third World people are seeing, that the country can make a real change. No changing or trading one master for another. The only real change would be to socialize the means of production and this is what’s happening in Jamaica.”

— Huey Newton

28. “I think the time is right for organizing and to give Blacks more political – the progressive Blacks, you have to make a distinction – participation, more Blacks in more authoritative positions, in more electoral political positions. But we want the right ones.”

— Huey Newton

29. “There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.”

— Huey Newton

30. “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.”

— Huey Newton

31. “I think it’s absurd to talk about – one time you were outside the system, now you are in the system – no, we fight, the cause of the fight is because the system is bad that we can’t get out of it.”

— Huey Newton

32. “I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.”

— Huey Newton

33. “I think the basis – the foundation – has already been laid for a society where people will work together and enjoy the wealth of the whole nation together. I think this will be accomplished because this is the theme of the revolutionary government’s program.”

— Huey Newton

34. “The nature of a panther is that he never attacks. But if anyone attacks or backs into a corner, the panther comes up to wipe that aggressor or that attacker out.”

— Huey Newton

35. “Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that.”

— Huey Newton

36. “To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea.”

— Huey Newton

37. “The reactionary suicide is ‘wise,’ and the revolutionary suicide is a ‘fool,’ a fool for the revolution in the way Paul meant when he spoke of being a ‘fool for Christ,’ That foolishness can move mountains of oppression; it is our great leap and our commitment to the dead and the unborn.”

— Huey Newton

38. “But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.”

— Huey Newton

39. “There’s no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively – I am one with the people.”

— Huey Newton

40. “We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked.”

— Huey Newton

41. “When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There’s play and there’s the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it’s a game.”

— Huey Newton

42. “The Cuban Revolutionary Government has been generous and very considerate to me and my family. I lived in Santa Clara for a few months because I wanted to work in the countryside and get to know the country better.”

— Huey Newton

43. “The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.”

— Huey Newton

44. “I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.”

— Huey Newton

45. “We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it’s unnecessary and it’s not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We’re going to need some stronger stuff.”

— Huey Newton

46. “I always said this and the people think it’s a cute answer, but I say we have always been in the system and that’s why we fight because we don’t like the system. We are trying to transform it.”

— Huey Newton

47. “I know sociologically that words, the power of the word, words stigmatize people.”

— Huey Newton

48. “A rather honored guest of the Cuban government, so I wouldn’t experience the problems. I think it would take a black Cuban to really articulate this because I’m being treated in a very generous way.”

— Huey Newton

49. “There is a very strong socialist movement in Jamaica. I was in Jamaica years ago. All the talk, all day they talk politics. The literacy rate is very low. Everyone is so interested in politics, more than those who can read in the United States.”

— Huey Newton

50. “I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth.”

— Huey Newton