They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people’s revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.

We were like heroes, to stand there and observe the police, and the police were scared to move upon us.

We were young political revolutionaries. [Then-California Gov.] Reagan said we hated white folk. That’s not true.

We jumped into the protest of Vietnam before the Black Panther Party ever started, before the Black Panther Party was even thought of. In fact, it was late 1965 and 1966 that the anti-Vietnam War,...

The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people....

On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn’t observe the police without guns, we took our guns with...

A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere. . . . the black communities of America must rise up as one man...

We don’t hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!

We didn’t care if you were white, black, green, yellow or polka-dotted. We just wanted to know where your heart was.

We were not talking about the average white person: we was talking about the corporate money rich and the racist jive politicians and the lackeys, as we used to call them, for the government who...

Seize the Time.

Our position was: “If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.

Marxist-Leninism per se was really a latter development: not until 1968 that we really considered the Red Book required reading.

You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.

You can jail a revolutionary, but you cannot jail the revolution.