Quotes from Huey P. Newton

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

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

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

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

Existence is violent, I exist, therefore I'm violent. . . in that way.

If you stop struggling, then you stop life.

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

My opinion is that the term "God" belongs to the realm of concepts, that it is dependent upon man for its existence. If God does not exist unless man exists, then man must be here to produce God. It

Marriage, family, and debt; in a sense, another kind of slavery.

That is often the way of the oppressor. He cannot understand the simple fact that people want to be free. So, when a man resists oppression, they pass it off by calling him "crazy" or "insane.

While life will always be filled with sound and fury, it can be more than a tale signifying nothing.

Richard had a theory about intimate human relations. He saw nonpossessive love as pure love, the only love, and possessive love as a mockery of pure love. Nonpossessive love did not enslave or constrain the love object.

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. . . . My homemade education gave me, with every additional book I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was affecting the black race in America. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Bourgeois values define the family situation in America, give it certain goals. Oppressed and poor people who try to reach these goals fail because of the very conditions that the bourgeoisie has established.

During the five years since the Party had been formed, it always seemed that time was measured not in days or months or hours but by the movements of comrades and brothers in and out of prison and by the dates of hearings, releases, and trials. Our lives were regulated not by the ordinary tempo of daily events but by the forced clockwork of the judicial process (330)

Blacks were working as hard as they could to become a part of the system; I could not relate to their goals. These brothers still believed in making it in the world. They talked about it loud and long, expressing the desire for families, houses, cars, and so forth. Even at that time I did not want those things. I wanted freedom, and possessions meant nonfreedom to me.

James Baldwin has pointed out that the United States does not know what to do with its Black population now that they "are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle." This country especially does not know what to do with its young Black men.

Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.

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

To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.

Huey coined the term "revolutionary suicide" to describe this phenomenon.

I began to think that Melvin's approach through books was one way to examine these questions. His life required a certain amount of detachment from the community, and that was attractive to me.

All the hipsters with cars, clothes, and money had rejected the family relationship that I valued so highly.

He felt that people should not be like cars or houses. No man should own a wife, nor should a wife own a husband, because ownership is predicated upon control, fences, barriers, constraints, and psychological tyranny. Nonpossessive love is based upon shared experiences and friendship; it is the kind of love we have for our bodies, for our thumb or foot. We love ourselves, our bodies, but we do not want to enslave any part of ourselves.