Quotes by Bobby Seale

“You dont fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.”

“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 to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.”

“Our position was: If you dont attack us, there wont be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.”

“We dont hate nobody because of their color. We hate oppression!”

“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 perpetuate all this exploitation and racism.”

“Seize the Time.”

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

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

“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, anti-draft to the Vietnam War protest started at University of California, Berkeley.”

“We were young political revolutionaries. [Then-California Gov.] Reagan said we hated white folk. Thats not true.”

You dont fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.

Revolution is about the need to re-evolve political, economic and social justice and power back into the hands of the people, preferably through legislation and policies that make human sense. Thats what revolution is about. Revolution is not about shootouts.

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. We didnt want to give a long dissertation.

Electoral politics was always an objective of the Black Panther party, so Barack Obama is a part of what we dreamed and struggled and died for.

To develop political and economic power in a capitalist society, you need capital.