Revolutionary Suicide Quotes

“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. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. 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. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—Black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. 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.

Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“‎"revolutionary suicide does not mean that i and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. we have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. when reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.”
― Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“I always carried lawbooks in my car. Sometimes, when a policeman was harassing a citizen, I would stand off a little and read the relevant portions of the penal code in a loud voice to all within hearing distance. In doing this, we were helping to educate those who gathered to observe these incidents. If the policeman arrested the citizen and took him to the station, we would follow and immediately post bail. Many community people could not believe at first that we had only their interest at heart. Nobody had ever given them any support or assistance when the police harassed them, but here we were, proud Black men, armed with guns and a knowledge of the law. Many citizens came right out of jail and into the Party, and the statistics of murder and brutality by policemen in our communities fell sharply.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Marriage, family, and debt; in a sense, another kind of slavery.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“While life will always be filled with sound and fury, it can be more than a tale signifying nothing.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere
I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their
answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even
self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and
asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I,
could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone
else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but
myself. RALPH ELLISON, The Invisible Man”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“When I began to read, a whole new world opened to me. I became interested in books. I still could not read very well, but each new book made it easier. I did not mind spending many hours, because reading was enjoyment, rather than work. When I reached this point, I accumulated books and read one after another. I did this all through my senior year in high school and the summer following. By the time I really knew my way through a book, I had graduated from high school.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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)”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“I]t is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Not that I am happy with the suffering; I simply refuse to be defeated by it.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim's family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another, until they wear out and give up. This is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their case. Time is money to poor people.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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 P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Misfortune is a test of people’s fidelity.
Those who protest at injustice are people of true merit.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“I even bragged to my friends how good I felt about the whole matter. When they were at my apartment during times when there wasn’t any food to eat, I told them that even though I starved, my time was my own and I could do anything I wanted with it. I didn’t have a car then, because most of my money was spent on the apartment, food, and clothes. When friends asked me why I did not get a car, I told them it was because I did not want bills and that a car was not my main goal or desire. My purpose was to have as much leisure time as possible. I could have pulled bigger jobs and gotten more, but I did not want any status symbols. I wanted most of all to be free from the life of a servant forced to take those low-paying jobs and looked at with scorn by white bosses.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“Looking back, I see that my friends and I were all in the same boat—heading for hell on earth and trying to reach heaven in church.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“I began to read. What I discovered in books led me to think, to question, to explore, and finally to redirect my life.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“One of the first things any Black child must learn is how to fight well.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“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”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“There is another illuminating story of the wise man and the fool, found in Mao's Little Red Book: A foolish old man went to North Mountain and began to dig; a wise old man passed by and said, 'Why do you dig, foolish old man? Do you not know that you cannot move the mountain with a little shovel?' But the foolish old man answered resolutely, 'While the mountain cannot get any higher, it will get lower with each shovelful. When I pass on, my sons and his sons and his son's sons will go on making the mountain lower. Why can't we move the mountain?' And the foolish old man kept digging, and the generations that followed after him, and the wise old man looked on in disgust. But the resoluteness and the spirit of the generations that followed the foolish old man touched God's heart, and God sent two angels who put the mountain on their backs and moved the mountain.

This is the story Mao told. When he spoke of God he meant the six hundred million who had helped him to move imperialism and bourgeois thinking, the two great mountains.

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

We will touch God's heart; we will touch the people's heart, and together we will move mountains.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide

“While the early Christians succeeded in undermining the authority and confidence of their rulers and rising up out of slavery, the Afro-American experience has been just the opposite. Already a people in slavery, when Christianity was imposed upon them, the Blacks only assumed another burden, the tyranny of the future—the hope of heaven and the fear of hell. Christianity increased their sense of hopelessness. It also projected the idea of salvation and happiness into the afterlife, where God would reward them for all their sufferings on this earth. Justice would come later, in the Promised Land.

The phrase “All Power to the People” was meant to turn this around, to convince Black people that their rewards were due in the present, that it was in their power to create a Promised Land here and now.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide