This collection of Assata Shakur quotes! Assata Shakur is an American activist and former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. She is the first woman to be placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list and has lived in Cuba since 1984. Her words continue to inspire and challenge us to think critically about the world around us. Here, you will find some of Assata’s best quotes on topics such as freedom, justice, and revolution. Enjoy!
Assata Shakur quotes about her court case and punishment
⚛ “After ten days, I was discharged from the hospital over the objections of my doctor, brought to the Middlesex county jail for men, and kept in solitary confinement from February 1974 until May 1974.” ― Assata Shakur
“Whenever a juror said something that revealed out-and-out prejudice, the judge would try to clean it up.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Even though the National Jury Project had done a study of Middlesex County and had found that eighty-three percent of the people had heard about my case in the media and seventy percent had already formulated an opinion about my guilt, the court maintained that I could receive a fair trial.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “They refused to let him examine me unless a white doctor, hired by the state, was present, and for the report to the judge, the white doctor had to examine me.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “The defense team’s headquarters, located in New Brunswick, was broken into, papers rummaged through and stolen, and the judge refused to investigate, calling the motion ‘frivolous’.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “We found out later that a lone Black juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “I also had monilia, a vaginal discharge, which worsened because the Montefiore Hospital doctors assigned to Rikers could not agree about how it should be treated. They refused to treat the condition at all until my culture was returned from Elmhurst Hospital. By the time they managed to get the culture back, the whole inside of my thigh was chapped raw from the discharge, and I could barely walk.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “One of the worst cases is that of ASSATA SHAKUR, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons, subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “He told the jury that I was hiding the fact that I had big fat arms like the woman who was shown robbing the bank, that I was concealing my arms because I had not worn a sleeveless dress in court (the trial was held in the middle of January). As he was talking, I politely rolled up my sleeves right there in the courtroom, exposing my very thin arms.” ― Assata Shakur
The saddest Assata Shakur quotes
⚛ “I will never forget the haunting scream of that child as she watched her father being brutally beaten.” ― Assata Shakur
“Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “They lock you in the hole and they don’t let you out until you consent to be searched internally.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “My neighbors ask me what the U.S. is like, and they accuse me of lying when I tell them about the hunger and cold and people sleeping in the streets. They refuse to believe me. How can that be in such a rich country?” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Won’t you at least call a gynecologist in to see me? You’re not a specialist in this area. “I don’t need you to tell me what my specialties are,” he said angrily. “It would be best for everybody concerned if you have an abortion, no matter which way you have it.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “When he returned at 6 P.M. that day, I still hadn’t seen the baby. He reminded them that I was supposed to breastfeed her. They told him he hadn’t ‘written a prescription’ for breastfeeding.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “When the draft law was enacted, tens of thousands of white workers in New York City took to the streets and brutally beat and murdered every Black person they could find. It has been estimated that between four hundred and a thousand Blacks were killed as a result of the so-called New York draft law riots. Draft riots and the murder of Blacks also took place in other Northern cities.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Too many people in the U.S. support death and destruction without being aware of it. They indirectly support the killing of our people without ever having to look at the corpses.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: I would forget how to talk.” ― Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur quotes about slavery, race, and freedom
⚛ “I had grown up believing the slaves hadn’t fought back. I remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in school.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “I am about life. I’m gonna live as hard as I can and as full as I can until I die. And I’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind before they are even born.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to what’s happening in the world, you’re under no obligation to do anything. But if you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk.” ― Assata Shakur
“I’m not quite sure what freedom is, but I know damn well what it ain’t. How have we gotten so silly, I wonder?” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police, armed only with their belief in justice and their desire for freedom.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well.” ― Assata Shakur
Inspiring Assata Shakur quotes
⚛ “I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means ‘She who struggles,’ Olugbala means ‘Love for the people,’ and I took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means ‘the thankful’.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “We were alive, and we were excited, and we believed that we were going to be free someday.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Before going back to college, I knew I didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.” ― Assata Shakur
“A wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “My energy just couldn’t stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of struggle, and I wanted to dance.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “But I never could make much sense out of war.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” ― Assata Shakur
Revolutionary thinking Assata Shakur quotes
⚛ “I thought about it all the way home. Of all the things I had wanted to be when I was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn’t one of them.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “A revolutionary woman can’t have no reactionary man.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “To win we have got to wear down our oppressors, little by little, and at the same time, strengthen our forces, slowly but surely.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “I had heard ‘communist bloc’ and ‘behind the iron curtain’ so much in the media, that I had naturally formed the impression that these countries were all the same. Although they are all socialist, East Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, and North Korea are as different as night and day.” ― Assata Shakur
“Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Schools in America are interested in brainwashing people with Americanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect America’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “That’s why political work and organizing are so important. Unless you are addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing positive direction, they’ll never support you. The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “When someone asked me what communism was, I opened my mouth to answer, then realized I didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren’t free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.” ― Assata Shakur
⚛ “We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.” ― Assata Shakur
Conclusion
Assata Shakur’s quotes are a reminder of the importance of working towards a more equitable society for all. Whether it’s her words about staying strong in the face of adversity or her thoughts on the power of collective action, Shakur’s words continue to inspire people around the world to take action and create a better world for everyone.