Quotes by Cleaver, Eldridge

"Too much agreement kills the chat."

Cleaver, Eldridge on agreement   

"All the gods are dead except the god of war."

Cleaver, Eldridge on god   

"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."

Cleaver, Eldridge on heroes and heroism   

"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."

Cleaver, Eldridge on intervention   

"In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all."

Cleaver, Eldridge on prison   

"Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due."

Cleaver, Eldridge on respectability
4 fans of this quote   

"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."

Cleaver, Eldridge on change   

"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."

Cleaver, Eldridge on twentieth century   

"You are either part of the solution or part of the problem."

Cleaver, Eldridge on choice
6 fans of this quote   

"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."

Cleaver, Eldridge on dance and dancing