Daily Inspiration Quote by Eldridge Cleaver

Hate looks like power from the outside, but Cleaver frames it as a kind of self-mutilation. The line works because it refuses the common moral ledger where hatred is “earned” by the other side’s sins. Instead, it treats hate as a recurring fee you pay with your own interior life: every act of dehumanization shrinks the self that’s doing the dehumanizing. “Price” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s economic language for an emotional crime, suggesting hatred isn’t just wrong, it’s costly, irrational spending - a bad investment that quietly drains your capacity for dignity.

The subtext is both political and intimate. Cleaver, writing out of the furnace of mid-century American racial violence and radicalization, understood how anger can be clarifying while hatred can be corrosive. The sentence doesn’t ask the oppressed to be polite; it warns that hatred, once it becomes identity rather than instrument, begins to colonize the hater’s psyche. Loving oneself less isn’t soft therapy talk; it’s a diagnosis of what supremacy and vengeance do to the soul: they require constant justification, constant narrative maintenance, constant denial of shared humanity. That maintenance erodes self-respect because it depends on lies.

In the context of activism, it’s also strategy. Movements collapse when they become mirror images of what they fight. Cleaver’s line argues that the real victory isn’t just changing laws or regimes; it’s refusing to let the enemy dictate who you become.