1935-, American Black Leader, Writer
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
Eldridge Cleaver – [God]
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.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Intervention]
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.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Change]
In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Prison]
Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Respectability]
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.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Heroes and Heroism]
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.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Dance and Dancing]
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.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Twentieth Century]
Too much agreement kills the chat.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Agreement]
You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver – [Choice]