Quotes from Assata Shakur

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LOVE Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars. But you, me, and tomorrow hold hands and make vows that struggle will multiply. The hacksaw has two blades. The shotgun has two barrels. We are pregnant with freedom. We are a conspiracy.

I had heard "communist bloc" and "behind the iron curtain" so much in the media, that i had naturally formed the impression that these countries were all the same. Although they are all socialist, East Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, and North Korea are as different as night and day.

Something has been happening to me, a change that has been a long time coming. I want to be real. Am I the only bad-doing, hand-to-mouth, barely-making-it Black woman there? The struggle I've been going through and the struggle I've been seeing is too hard to lie about and I don't even want to try. I want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind. I don't want to style and profile in front of nobody.

Judge Bachman

They recited detail after detail from newspapers and TV. "Where were you hiding that night on the turnpike?" i wanted to scream at them. "I didn't see you!

he was the same judge who had just given Mitchell and Stans, the Watergate defendants, who did not have one fraction of the valid reasons for an adjournment that we had, an extended postponement.

Jury selection continued with only the judge and the prosecutor participating.

I also had monilia, a vaginal discharge, which worsened because the Montefiore Hospital doctors assigned to Rikers could not agree about how it should be treated. They refused to treat the condition at all until my culture was returned from Elmhurst Hospital. By the time they managed to get the culture back, the whole inside of my thigh was chapped raw from the discharge, and i could barely walk.

One drug dealer made frequent visits to the women's section in the wee small hours for conjugal visits with his wife.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has gotten their freedom, by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them

Our desire to be free has got to manifest itself in everything we are and do. We have accepted too much of a negative lifestyle and a negative culture and have to consciously act to rid ourselves of that negative influence.

The defense team's headquarters, located in New Brunswick, was broken into, papers rummaged through and stolen, and the judge refused to investigate, calling the motion "frivolous.

The main witness, Harper, the state trooper i was supposed to have shot, testified he had told an "untruth" on direct examination but denied it was a lie.

But I never could make much sense out of war.

a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.

After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

I wanted to struggle on a full-time basis.