You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that humanity is inherent, but negative behaviors must be addressed and corrected.
Eldridge Cleaver's quote suggests that being human is a natural state, while inhumanity and negative behaviors are learned or adopted. Instead of instructing individuals on what it means to be human, we should focus on helping them unlearn harmful behaviors that detract from their inherent humanity.
In practice
During a seminar on compassion in the workplace, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of fostering a supportive environment.
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.
The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.
But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is.
This is the great lesson that we are here to learn through myriads of births and heavens and hells - that there is nothing to be asked for, desired for, beyond one's spiritual Self (atman).
I look forward to death with great anticipation, to meeting God face to face.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so; life's business being just the terrible choice.
One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives.
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