Top 25 Quotes & Sayings by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Conventional wisdom would have one believe.

If the Constitution can be used against one, it can be used against all.

here and there in the barrios and the favelas, among those who have least, beat hearts of hope, fly sparks of Overcoming.

Free people have a right to decide for themselves what they want to hear.

Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.

Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires… But what history really shows is that today`s empire is tomorrow`s ashes, that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.

I was punished for communicating.

If they survive, today's children will inherit a world that our fathers and grandfathers have ravaged, where the seas are acidic cesspools that the whales have fled, where rain forests are Indian memories never to return, and where human greed has plundered Mother Earth's innards and turned human genes into factories for profit. They will inherit a diminished planet where fresh water is increasingly rare, and where fresh air is a commodity... We live in a world that fears and hates its young. How else can one explain the bequest of such a foul, polluted, and hollow inheritance?

Before this generation goes on to its ancestors, we should, we must, do our level best to pass on our lessons, so that they live in our people's minds and lives.

Elie Wiesel says that the greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference. If that is true, then the opposite is also true: that the greatest love we can show our children is the attention we pay them, the time we take for them. Maybe we serve children the best simply by noticing them.

Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.

The state would rather give me an uzi than a microphone.

The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

Today's empire is tomorrow's ashes...

The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion.

I think because I came into journalism by way of the Black Panther Party - and not J-school or a corporate bourgeois institution - I tried to do news, writing and reporting that had social, political and racial content and context.

Very few people in prison have voices that go beyond the wall. It's my job to do the work for them because they have no one.

I have learned not to do predictions. It's not helpful, psychologically. I don't sit and fret about things.

If you ain't angry, you ain't paying attention.

When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice.

Many claim that it is insane to resist the system; but actually, it is insane not to.

Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.

I spend my days preparing for life, not preparing for death.

At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death.

The United States is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth