Huey Newton

“I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.”

“The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.”

“We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.”

“There's no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively - I am one with the people.”

“You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree's fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down - bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.”

“I have the people behind me and the people are my strength.”

“Malcolm X was the first political person in this country that I really identified with. If he had lived and not been purged, I probably would have joined the Muslims.”

“Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.”

“My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.”

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

“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.”

“There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.”

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

“I didn't get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.”

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

“If you stop struggling, then you stop life.”

“The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.”

“We've never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.”

“You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.”

“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”