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They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.

— Assata Shakur To My People (1973)

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More quotes by Assata Shakur

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions.

My name is Assata ("she who struggles") Olugbala ( "for the people" ) Shakur ("the thankful one"), and I am a 20th century escaped slave.

Too many people in the u.s. support death and destruction without being aware of it. They indirectly support the killing of people without ever having to look at the corpses.

Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, has got to come to the conclusion that they don't know what it feels like to be Free.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Assata Shakur (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.