Eldridge Quotes & Sayings

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears.
co-author with Niles Eldridge — Stephen Jay Gould

I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights. — Eldridge Cleaver

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. — Eldridge Cleaver

It can undermine the most sincere parental commitment and force adoptees to suffer in private, choosing either rebellion or conformity as a mode of relating. — Sherrie Eldridge

As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world. — William Eldridge Odom

Having read the inscriptions upon the tombstones of the great and little cemeteries, Wang Peng advised the Emperor to kill all the living and resurrect the dead. — Paul Eldridge

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled. — Paul Eldridge

Every highly successful person is a maniac on a mission. Too much agreement kills a chat — Eldridge Cleaver

With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads with them. — Paul Eldridge

Many a necklace becomes a noose. — Paul Eldridge

The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. — Eldridge Cleaver

You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem. — Eldridge Cleaver

Then one detail caught my attention. "Time (of birth), 5:57 A.M." Wow! I really was born! I wasn't an alien who was dropped down into my adoptive parents' arms. I was a real baby who experienced a real birth from a real mother at a real time of day. For me, that tid-bit of information was like a meal to a starving woman. — Sherrie Eldridge

Because our birth mothers made a choice for us that dramatically changed the course of our lives and over which we had no control, many of us have a foundational belief (often unconscious) that we don't have the right to choose our own course in life. We feel instead that we are at the mercy of others. — Sherrie Eldridge

Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He — John Updike

Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt. — Eldridge Cleaver

I know that the black man's sick attitude toward the white woman is
a revolutionary sickness: it keeps him perpetually out of harmony with the
system that is oppressing him. Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the Negro male's
lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an esthetic attraction,
but nothing could be further from the truth. His motivation is often of such
a bloody, hateful, bitter, and malignant nature that whites would really
be hard pressed to find it flattering. — Eldridge Cleaver

Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable. — Eldridge Cleaver

How you choose to respond to each moment of the movie of life determines how you see the next frame, and the next, and eventually how you feel when the movie ends. — Sherrie Eldridge

Talent only gives an imperfect image--the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of Genius remain unruffled. — Robert Eldridge Aris Willmott

I'd listened to [Ornette Coleman] all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby. — Roy Eldridge

The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet. — Eldridge Cleaver

Read Talking With Young Children About Adoption by Susan Fisher, M.D., and Mary Watkins, Ph.D. (Yale University Press, 1995). — Sherrie Eldridge

You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours. (To Black Panther militant Eldridge Cleaver) — Gordon Parks

We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it. — Eldridge Cleaver

Werewolves did not consider wolves one of their own; in fact, wolves were inferior. They were hunters, strong and ravenous like them, but they weren't as big or as intelligent. — Janiera Eldridge

Reading the epitaphs, our only salvation lies in resurrecting the dead and burying the living. — Paul Eldridge

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows. — Paul Eldridge

They look at adoption through rose-colored glasses, trying to make it a win/win situation for unplanned pregnancies and infertility, never giving a thought about what effect adoption has on the child. — Sherrie Eldridge

You realize you've never walked in another person's shoes. Never have. Never will. The same is true in adoption. There are three sets of adoption shoes sitting at the end of the boardwalk. The adoptees ... the birth parents' ... and the adoptive parents'. Each is unique and each has a story to tell. — Sherrie Eldridge

God? Where was he? She was quite certain he abandoned her. — Matthew Eldridge

I didn't know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes ... man I dug. — Roy Eldridge

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music. — Eldridge Cleaver

I was a young cat, and I was very fast, but I wasn't telling no kind of story. — Roy Eldridge

Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode. — Gil Scott-Heron

I have this deep need to bond with real blood relatives, but I feel like I'm not really a part of either of my families. — Sherrie Eldridge

Every time I embrace a black woman I'm embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I'm hugging freedom. The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death ... . I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed. — Eldridge Cleaver

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him. — Paul Eldridge

Because adoption is a lifelong journey, we have a future filled with the potential to learn invaluable lessons. But many of us haven't been taught that we have a choice in every situation in life. — Sherrie Eldridge

You're not a hero, despite what people say. You don't need to be a hero to save a life. You just need to be alive enough. A person who loves enough will have a reason to save a life. A person who is curious enough will find a way. A person who is brave enough will have things they would die for because they have discovered moments worth dying for long before their bravery was needed. Discover what matters, then be alive enough to fight for it. Be alive enough, and you'll change the world. - Eldridge, The Five Unnecessaries — Laura Campbell

Listen to your hearts, parents! You are the expert when it comes to knowing your child. I love the Scripture that says we are to let the peace of God rule in our hearts ... In other words, peace in your heart is to be like an umpire calling the shots. When in doubt
DON'T! — Sherrie Eldridge

Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something. — Sherrie Eldridge

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. — Eldridge Cleaver

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. — Eldridge Cleaver

The truth is, the very act of adoption is built upon loss. For the birth parents, the loss of their biological offspring, the relationship that could have been, a very part of themselves. For the adoptive parents, the loss of giving birth to a biological child, the child whose face will never mirror theirs. And for the adopted child, the loss of the birth parents, the earliest experience of belonging and acceptance. To deny adoption loss is to deny the emotional reality of everyone involved. — Sherrie Eldridge

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold. — Paul Eldridge

Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went — Malcolm Gladwell

In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect. — William Eldridge Odom

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits. — Paul Eldridge

You know, there was a part of me that was so defiant, and a part of me that was so ashamed, and I really couldn't say which was which at any given point in time. — Courtney Eldridge

If we were created from the very fiber of our birth parents' physical and emotional beings, don't you think our need to think about them would be innate? If we had primal conversations with our mother in the womb, wouldn't you say it is natural for us to think about her as we are growing up and growing old? And if our birth father's DNA helped determine the color of our hair and eyes, wouldn't you say that he is just as much a part of us as our mother and it is normal to want a relationship with him? Wherever we are in the spectrum of perceptions about our birth parents, we must rest assured that our thoughts are normal and healthy. They are part of the fiber of our being. Part of the package of being adopted. It is all about our identity ... our dual identity. — Sherrie Eldridge

If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem. — Eldridge Cleaver

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. — Eldridge Cleaver

I don't want people to think he [Eldridge Cleaver] is so important - our party is important because our party works for the people and no individual is important in our party, including myself. — Huey Newton

Too much agreement kills a chat. — Eldridge Cleaver

What we're saying today is that you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem. — Eldridge Cleaver

I have lived those lines and I know that if I had not been apprehended I would have slit some white throats. — Eldridge Cleaver

But it is not that easy, is it? I seek a lasting relationship, something permanent in a world of change, in which all is transitory, ephemeral, and full of pain. — Eldridge Cleaver

I have taken an oath in my heart to oppose communism until the day I die. — Eldridge Cleaver

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is whiteblacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity. — Eldridge Cleaver

Adoptive parents often say about adoption day: "It was the happiest day of our lives!" While most of us are happy to be adopted, our own hearts tell us that adoption day was the most painful day of our lives, for the person with whom we shared deep intimacy suddenly disappeared from our world. — Sherrie Eldridge

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. — Eldridge Cleaver

Nobody could have possibly known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, 'signed' by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton's leadership... no one could have known that the FBI's cointelpro was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular, and the Black Liberation movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics. — Assata Shakur

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism. — Paul Eldridge

Many critics always saw and heard that my style comes from Roy Eldridge, which is true. But for many things, not only how to play the trumpet but the way to choose the notes, how to play them and how to phrase all of them, I took that from Sweets [Edison]. He really brought something new to the trumpet. — Dizzy Gillespie

Everybody changes, not just me. — Eldridge Cleaver

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all. — Eldridge Cleaver

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird. — Paul Eldridge

We have dedicated our lives, our blood, to the freedom and liberation of our people, and nothing, no force can stop us from achieving our goal. If it is necessary to destroy the United States of America, then let us destroy it with a smile on our faces. — Eldridge Cleaver

To judge a man's character by only one of its manifestations is like judging the sea by a jugful of its water. — Paul Eldridge

Truth becomes the foundation for every other life task. — Sherrie Eldridge

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities. — Paul Eldridge

what manhood is. We know that under capitalism, manhood is defined according to the amount of money a male has. Puerto Ricans, since they are exploited by capitalists, have no money, and as a result no status or prestige. As Eldridge Cleaver puts it, our men are "deballed." Since they can't prove manhood economically, they try to do it sexually at the expense of their women. — Darrel Enck-Wanzer

I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other. I do not want to "hold" you, I want you to "stay" out of your own need for me. — Eldridge Cleaver

Ah, what sights and sounds and pain lie beneath that mist. And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful, sunlit place
but it's all jungle here, a wild and savage wilderness that's overrun with ruins. But put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a New City on these ruins. — Eldridge Cleaver

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones. — Paul Eldridge

We always had a central committee. They were mesmerized by Eldridge Cleaver. — Huey Newton

And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love. — Eldridge Cleaver

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman. — Eldridge Cleaver

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood. — Eldridge Cleaver

Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks. — Paul Eldridge

If God himself wills such misery on people whom I love, then I say I will deal with him — Eldridge Cleaver

For having expressed an opinion, however far-fetched, we straightway become its slave, ready to die defending it, and even ready to believe it. And many continue to be martyrs to causes which have ceased to exist, their crowns rusting upon their heads as tin wreaths rust upon forgotten tombs. — Paul Eldridge

You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver — Eldridge Cleaver

We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity. — Paul Eldridge

The advantage of having an unexpected opportunity to successfully grieve our early-life losses; to enjoy healthy relationships; to develop an unshakable sense of self-esteem; to find our unique purposes in life; to have peace about our adoption experiences; to find our true identities ... now I am alive ... fully alive and on the cutting edge of my life's journey. What better place could one be? — Sherrie Eldridge

I resolved to play my trumpet like a sax. — Roy Eldridge

What America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind. — Eldridge Cleaver

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. — Paul Eldridge

I believe one of the most sacrificial acts of love adoptive parents can do is to give up their preconceptions and agendas about what their child's views "should" be and be open to hear the conflicting emotions and thoughts their child often experiences. — Sherrie Eldridge

It is not true that men prefer foolish women. Rather they prefer women who can simulate foolishness whenever necessary, which is the very core of intelligence. — Paul Eldridge

It is a celebration of the fact that we were adopted for a purpose and that adoption is an experience that has the potential of teaching us some of life's richest and deepest lessons. — Sherrie Eldridge

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. — Jack Kerouac

I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, 'push myself forward like a train. — Eldridge Cleaver

At Verve, my bookkeeper would invariably say, 'Well, why do you want to put out Roy Eldridge?' Or 'Why do you want to put out Ben Webster? They don't sell.' And I'd say, 'Well, whether they sell or not, they're important, they should be recorded and they're what Verve stands for, so we don't have to discuss that any further. — Norman Granz

All the gods are dead except the god of war. — Eldridge Cleaver

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few. — William Eldridge Odom

Rick Eldridge over at Reelworks Studios has the same vision that I have. They want to make good family quality product with a redemptive message underneath to allow people to open their hearts and minds. That (mindset) really drew me to The Ultimate Life ... Their vision and what they want to do very similar to me and Erin. — Drew Waters

Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. The labor crises settled at the negotiating table is nothing compared to the confrontation that results in a strike ... normality has become the nemesis of network news. — Spiro T. Agnew

A man's character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate. — Paul Eldridge