You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Meaning of the quote
This quote means that people are naturally human and good, but sometimes they forget how to treat others with kindness and respect. Instead of teaching people how to be better, we should help them remember what it means to be a good person and stop doing things that are unkind or unfair to others.
More quotes from Eldridge Cleaver
I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die.
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Too much agreement kills a chat.
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The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
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What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind.
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The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
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There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.
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If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.
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History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.
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I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.
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Respect commands itself and can neither be given nor withheld when it is due.
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You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
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All the gods are dead except the god of war.
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You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.
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In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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