People From California

"You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible."

"We suffer only until we realize that we can’t know anything."

"Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over."

"If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror."

"Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom."

"We say to others only what we need to hear."

"Have you asked you?"

"Seeking love keeps you from the awareness that you already have it—that you are it."

"When they attack you and you notice that you love them with all your heart, your Work is done."

"The last story: God is everything, God is good."

"The miracle of love comes to us in the presence of the uninterpreted moment."

"We never make a decision. When the time is right, the decision makes itself."

"There are no physical problems—only mental ones."

"Until we know that death is equal to life, we live in fear."

"Ultimately, I am all I can know."

"Everyone and everything is doing its job perfectly—no mistake."

"The teacher you need is the person you’re living with."

"We do only three things in life: we sit, we stand, we lie horizontal. The rest is just a story."

"Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know you’ve attached to something not true for you."

"There are no new stressful thoughts. They’re all recycled."

"Thoughts aren’t personal. They just appear, like raindrops. Would you argue with a raindrop?"

"Until you look forward to criticism, your Work’s not done."

"What is is. You don’t get a vote. Haven’t you noticed?"

"“I don’t know” is my favorite position."

"Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you."

"I’m a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality."

"You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood."

"The moon belongs to everyone; The best things in life are free. The stars belong to everyone; They gleam there for you and me."

"You're sent from heaven And I know your worth. You made a heaven for me here on the earth. When I'm old and grey, dear, Promise you won't stray, dear, For I love you so, Sonny Boy."

"If you knew Susie like I know Susie, Oh, oh, oh what a girl! There's none so classy as this fair lassie, Oh, oh, Holy Moses, what a chassis!"

"If April showers Should come your way, They bring the flowers That bloom in May."

"An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment."

"In January 1968, after an attack on seven hundred antiwar activists picketing Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech in San Francisco, one of the jailed victims, a Berkeley student, said of the attacking police, “They wanted to kill and would have if they could have gotten away with it. I know now that they were out to put Huey away, except Huey had the good sense to defend himself.” The reference was to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers in California in 1966 and became the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district in 1968 while in prison awaiting trial in connection with the death of one and wounding of another Oakland policeman in a 1966 shoot-out. The first trial, in the summer of 1968, ended in a mistrial, as did two subsequent ones. Almost all of the major trials of Black Panthers ended in mistrials, acquittals, or convictions overturned on appeal, further fueling the suspicion that they were being persecuted by the police. In the course of the trials, plausible evidence of police brutality turned up, including in one case, allegedly murdering two suspects in their beds. The Black Panthers were increasingly being seen as victims of violence, martyrs who courageously stood up to the police."

"To say that I loved Huey, however, even at that moment would be to say too little I loved being loved by him. I loved the protection he offereed with his powerful arms and fearless dreams. I loved how beautiful he was, sinewy, and sultry at once. I loved his genius and his bold uses of it. I loved that he was the vicarious dream of a man that white men hid from themselves, except when he confronted them, their rules, their world. I loved his narrow buttocks and his broad shoulders and his clean skin. I loved being the queen of his world, for he had fashioned a new world for those who dared. Yet I had come to hate life with him. His madness had become as full-blown as his genius. The numerous swaggering "dicks" who had challenged the hero to prove his manhood had finally taken their toll. Now had had outdone them all, including himself."

"He admitted killing Officer John Frey. He said that before he killed Frey, the police and the power structure could just come down to the black community and do anything they wanted. But after he shot Frey, much of that changed."

"I doubt he knew my name, but I loved him. Huey - self-taught, brilliant, taciturn, strong-willed - molded in righteous indignation and rage of an oppressed people into a national, militant, revolutionary nationalist organization."

"Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind."

"The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it."

"It is a fundamental assertion of this study that the majority society, in its fear-provoked zeal to maintain and assure its inequitable position in American society, flirted with and came dangerously close to total abandonment of the particular freedom upon which all others are ultimately dependent, the right to disagree. Moreover, it is an ancillary claim of this study that the danger has not yet passed."

"Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves."

"Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence."

"We must ally ourselves with the oppressed communities of the world. We cannot make our stand as nationalists, we cannot even make our stand as internationalists. We must place our future hopes upon the philosophy of intercommunalism, a philosophy which holds that the rise of imperialism in America transforms all other nations into oppressed communities. In revolutionary love we must make common cause with these oppressed communities."

"In their quest for freedom and in their attempts to prevent the oppressor from striping them of all the things they need to exist, the people see things as moving from A to B to C; they do not see things as moving from A to Z."

"We realized at a very early point in our development that revolution is a process. It is not a particular action, nor is it a conclusion. It is a process."

"Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something he does not have."

"The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind."

"When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun."

"The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people."

"Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreements about this function of law in any circle-the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interest better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation."

"I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness."