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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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Assata Shakur
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 14
Activist
Jamaica
Queens
Joanne Deborah Byron
Hard
Telling
Giving
Struggle
Thing
Asks
Things
Keep
People
Truth
Give
Reminds
States
Struggling
Come
Honey

More quotes by 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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Cuba has its own moral system and priorities. That's what keeps it going, the belief that the country can control its own destiny.
Assata Shakur
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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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There is something about Sundiata [Acoli] that exudes calm. From every part of his being you can sense the presence of revolutionary spirit and fervor. And his love for Black people is so intense that you can almost touch it and hold it in your hand.
Assata Shakur
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I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.
Assata Shakur
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There's something about approaching 50 that's very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I've been putting off all my life.
Assata Shakur
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My fantasy of Cuba was that everybody was going to be going around looking like Fidel, with green uniforms - and it was very different from my vision of how Cuba was going to be.
Assata Shakur
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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
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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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Hip Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people's political and social consciousness. But just as with any weapon, if you don't know how to use it, if you don't know where to point it, or what you're using it for, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot or killing your sisters or brothers.
Assata Shakur
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I miss friends and family. If it weren't for visits from old friends and other African Americans I meet who come to Cuba, I'd probably be in some kind of time warp.
Assata Shakur
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Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people's freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.
Assata Shakur
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When you go through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will look like the hair of another race of people then you are making a statement and the statement is clear
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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It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.
Assata Shakur
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What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.
Assata Shakur
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We're living in a very tricky world, and unless we become analytical and expose the tricknology, people will become sucked into that. It is very easy, it is very, very easy.
Assata Shakur
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We had to learn that we're beautiful. We had to relearn something forcefully taken from us. We had to learn about Black power. People have power if we unite. We learned the importance of coming together and being active
Assata Shakur
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Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It's really working to create something beautiful.
Assata Shakur
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People are really beginning to see the mechanisms of imperialism. When colonialism existed people could see colonialism. When racial segregation existed in its apartheid form, people could see the whites only signs. But it's much more difficult to see the structures of neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism, neo-slavery.
Assata Shakur