Daily Inspiration Quote by Eldridge Cleaver

A line like this doesn’t ask you to think; it dares you to pick a side. Eldridge Cleaver’s formulation is blunt to the point of coercion, and that’s the point: in a moment of political emergency, neutrality reads as complicity. The sentence weaponizes a simple binary to collapse the comfortable space where people hide out - the “I’m just being realistic,” “both sides,” “not political” posture that preserves one’s self-image while leaving the power structure untouched.

Cleaver’s context matters. Speaking from the terrain of Black Power-era militancy, prison radicalization, and a state apparatus that treated dissent as a security threat, he’s not offering a seminar on civic engagement. He’s issuing a morale test. “Solution” doesn’t mean polite incrementalism; it implies collective risk, organization, and the willingness to absorb consequences. “Problem” isn’t merely an opposing ideology; it’s the entire system of passivity, fear, and self-interest that keeps injustice lubricated. The genius is how it recruits the listener’s conscience: if you refuse the “solution” label, you get drafted into the “problem” by default.

The subtext is also strategic. Movements need discipline, turnout, money, bodies in rooms, people willing to be unpopular. A binary like this creates social pressure - a way to sort allies from spectators, and spectators from obstacles. It’s rhetorically unfair, intentionally. Cleaver is betting that moral clarity, even when it oversimplifies, can outmuscle the ambiguities that let oppression endure.