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
Topics: Dancing, Dance
Too much agreement kills the chat.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Agreement
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
Topics: Change
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: God
Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Respectability, Respect
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Hate
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the “American Way of Life” is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don’t dig their caveman mops? They couldn’t care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don’t like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Twentieth Century
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
Topics: Heroes/Heroism
You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Part of The Whole, Choices, Realism, Choice
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
In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Prison
Too much agreement kills a chat.
—Eldridge Cleaver
Topics: Communication
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Abbie Hoffman American Political Activist
- Henry Steele Commager American Historian
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Glenn Beck American Mormon Children’s Books Writer
- Joseph F. Smith American Religious Leader
- William Gaddis American Novelist
- Robert C. Townsend American Businessman
- Frank Sinatra American Singer
- Ivy Baker Priest American Politician
- Al Gore American Politician, Environmentalist
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