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Being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression, otherwise I would have been free to be so much more.

Assata Shakur

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Assata Shakur
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 14
Activist
Jamaica
Queens
Joanne Deborah Byron
Otherwise
Free
Much
Would
Oppression
Warrior
Forced

More quotes by Assata Shakur

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Being in Cuba has allowed me to live in a society that is not at war with itself. There is a sense of community. It's a given in Cuba that, if you fall down, the person next to you is going to help you get up.
Assata Shakur
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I can't do nothin except try to find cloud nine.
Assata Shakur
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A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man.
Assata Shakur
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I'm truly blessed, because many of my friends come to Cuba. They like it here-they can relax and not worry about drive-by shootings or getting raped.
Assata Shakur
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I had to adjust to living in a Third World country, which means that things people in the U.S. take for granted-like hot running water whenever you turn on the tap-are not always available.
Assata Shakur
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People come telling the truth. When I ask how thing are in the States, they don't give me the okeydoke. They say, Honey, things are hard. It reminds me I have to keep struggling.
Assata Shakur
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I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty - that's positive.
Assata Shakur
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We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It's not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.
Assata Shakur
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I don't have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating.
Assata Shakur
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My experience in the United States was living in a society that was very much at war with itself, that was very alienated. People felt not part of a community, but like isolated units that were afraid of interaction, of contact, that were lonely.
Assata Shakur
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I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day.
Assata Shakur
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I must confess that waltzes do not move me, I guess I hummed the blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.
Assata Shakur
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As far as I was concerned, the Panthers were 'baaaaaad.' The Party was more than bad it was bodacious. The sheer audacity of walking onto the California Senate floor with rifles, demanding that Black people have the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense, made me sit back and take a long look at them.
Assata Shakur
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I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade
Assata Shakur
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A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black family, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation, then he ain't about nothing.
Assata Shakur
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Every person that steps up and commits to social change helps solidify the black movement cause. It is not easy for those who fill in the leader role.
Assata Shakur
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To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
Assata Shakur
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When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
Assata Shakur
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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
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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