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Steve Biko Quotes

Total quotes: 10
“You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.”
— Steve Biko, On Death
Tagged: Life, Death, alive
“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”
— Steve Biko
Tagged: Death, idea, Sacrifice, Life
“Apartheid — both petty and grand — is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: Evil, Arrogance, Foreigners, Life
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: weapon, Oppressed, Mind, Thoughts, Ideas
“We must realise that prophetic cry of black students: "Black man you are on your own!”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: Black, Race, Independence
“The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: system, demands, Methods
“What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. We do not need to apologise for this because it is true that the white systems have produced through the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: Black, Consciousness, Colective Consciousness, Race, Oppression
“Even today, we are still accused of racism. This is a mistake. We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.”
— Steve Biko, Statement quoted in the Boston Globe
Tagged: racism, Superiority, inferior
“The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country. Not so long ago this used to be freely said in parliament, even about the educational system of the black people. It is still said even today, although in a much more sophisticated language. To a large extent the evil-doers have succeeded in producing at the output end of their machine a kind of black man who is man only in form. This is the extent to which the process of dehumanization has advanced.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: Race, racism, domination
“A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness. The question often comes up `what can you do?`. If you ask him to do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged, you always get the answer - `but that's unrealistic!' While this may be true, it only serves to illustrate the fact that mo matter what a white man does, the colour of his skin - his passport to privilege- will always put him miles ahead of the black men. Thus in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp.”
— Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings
Tagged: Liberal, Oppression, racism, Race, Color
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