Quotes about and from Eldridge Cleaver:
"All the gods are dead except for the god of war."
"We are a very sick country ? I, perhaps, am sicker than most. But I accept that. I told you in the beginning that I am extremist by nature ? so it is only right that I should be extremely sick."
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
"Malcolm X had a special meaning for black convicts. A former prisoner himself, he had risen from the lowest depths to great heights. For this reason he was a symbol of hope, a model for thousands of black convicts who found themselves trapped in the vicious PPP cycle; prison-parole-prison.... One thing that judges, policemen, and administrators of prisons seem never to have understood, and for which they certainly do not make any allowances, is that Negro convicts, basically, rather than see themselves as criminals and perpetrators of misdeeds, look upon themselves as prisoners of war, the victims of a vicious, dog-eat-dog system that is so heinous as to cancel out their own malefactions; in the jungle there is no right or wrong."
Eldridge Cleaver Soul on Ice, (p.64).
"After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray -- astray not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized -- for I could not approve the act of rape. Even thought I had some insight into my own motivations, I did not feel justified. I lost my self-respect. My pride as a man dissolved and my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered. That is why I started to write. To save myself."
Eldridge Cleaver, "Soul on Ice"
"I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto-in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day-and when I considered myself smooth enough, I cross the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically-though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind
From Eldridge Cleaver's obituary[citation needed]:
In one essay, Cleaver described his rape of white women as ?an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man?s law ? defiling his women.?
?I wanted to send waves of consternation through the white race,? he said.
