Quotes from Assata Shakur

I believe in uniting with white revolutionaries to fight against a common enemy, but i was convinced that it had to be on the basis of power and unity rather than from weakness and unity at any cost.

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

Charlie was one of the women who worked the hardest to get better medical conditions. It's kind of ironic when i think about it now. A little more than a year later, i heard over the prison grapevine that Charlene had died from undiagnosed cancer of the uterus.

when he returned, at 6 P.M. that day, i still hadn't seen the baby. He reminded them that i was supposed to breastfeed her. They told him he hadn't "written a prescription" for breastfeeding.

I knew I didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell was going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.

Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out.

Fine print and white lawyers have a way of robbing Black people of what is theirs.

The FBI cannot find any evidence that i was born. On my FBI wanted poster, they list my birth date as July 16, 1947, and, in parentheses, 'not-substantiated by birth records.' Anyway, i was born.

They had used the law to abuse the law.

the questions we submitted and others that the prosecutor submitted. After we went through the answers we were to pick or eliminate jurors, asking additional questions as needed. Some of the answers were so contradictory and such a study on the level of racism in amerika that it would take a book just to report on them. In one hundred percent of the cases we were able to tell whether the prospective juror was Black, white, or "other," just by reading the answers.

The only thing was that, once the $100,000 cash bail was raised, pig judge Murtagh refused to release him or any of the others. We were furious and helpless.

Arrogance was one of the factors that kept the white left so factionalized.

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.

In a hot second, the marshals and the FBI agents are crawling all over me. They seem to be trying to jerk my head off my shoulders. The judge has ordered that i am to be photographed, today, now, and that all the force necessary to take the pictures in the way the FBI wants to take them is to be used.

No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times. If it isn't growing, it's stagnant, and without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is.

Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.

Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself

Most of the class was Black or Puerto Rican and we all loved music. But we hated music class with a passion. The teacher talked to us as though we were inferior savages, incapable of appreciating the finer things in life. She lectured about symphonies and concertos and sonatas and the like in a snooty voice.

The police photographer asks, "Don't you wanna give us a smile? Come on. Give us a smile.

I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty - that's positive.

I miss friends and family. If it weren't for visits from old friends and other African Americans I meet who come to Cuba, I'd probably be in some kind of time warp.

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. 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.

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.