Bobby Seale Quotes

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.

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

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party- whose members for the most part come from the ghetto- seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people's language.

The Black Panther Party were not revenge nationalists.

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 us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.

I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

The only solution to pollution is a people's humane revolution!

Money is the medium of exchange, and it's how you make things happen. To say you hate it is some farfetched, idealistic crap.

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.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

I have quite a few good friends in Philadelphia who were police officers.

There's nothing wrong with being a cop. There's nothing wrong with being a white person. It's about where your heart is ... We've got to get everyone beyond the xenophobic isolationism.

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.

If they had not murdered Malcolm X, there probably never would have been a Black Panther Party.

I think I can capture the taste buds of the average right-wing conservative who loves barbecue.

All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights.

The Black Panther Party was not a gang. They grew out of a young black intelligentsia on college campuses.

I am not a hoodlum. I'm a community organizer.

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.

I think the American Dream should be about a greater progressive legislation that allows for what I call a necessary future world of cooperational humanism.

I like Barack Obama.

Huey was something else. Huey was out of sight. He knew how to do it. Huey was ten motherfuckers.

People called me a hoodlum and a thug. But they didn't tell you I was a carpenter, an architect, a stand-up comic - even a bartender. And a barbecue cook. But they didn't tell you that.

You can't call yourself a university and exclude whole ethnic groups.

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.

I'm going to have to call up Spike Lee. I did a cameo for him in 'Malcolm X,' and I'm trying to get him to do my life story and the history of the Black Panther Party.

I always tried to raise money for the Black Panthers through business schemes.

My father was a master carpenter and builder. Architectural design, engineering design, mechanical design, three-dimensional views, that was my shtick, my forte.

There is an entire generation of young people who know nothing about how viciously the FBI attacked The Black Panther Party, and why.

I'm a progressive. The progression has to be manifested in a new direction in policies and legislation.