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Race Quotes

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Race Quotes

“For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices.... The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.”

“But I would emphasize again that social and economic solutions, as such, will not avail to satisfy the aspirations of the people unless they conform with the traditions of our race, deeply grooved in their sentiments through a century and a half of struggle for ideals of life that are rooted in religion and fed from purely spiritual springs.”

“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”

“It is fitting that the Government of the United States should assume the obligation of the establishment and maintenance of a first-class university for the education of colored menand I wish to put in this caveatthat the colored race today, all of them, would be better off if they all had university education.... Of course, the basis of education of the colored people is in the primary schools and in industrial schools.... In those schools must be introduced teachers from such university institutions as this.”

“(Brazil:) I've never beheld such a paradise. The people are enchanting and--a mercy on this earth of ours--this is the only placewhere there isn't any race question. Negroes and whites and Indians, three-quarters, oneeighth, the wonderful Mulatto and Creole women, Jews and Christians, all dwell together in a peace that passes describing. The Jewish immigrants are in seventh heaven; all of them have jobs and feel at home.”

“... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.”

“Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn't change the old racial order. I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.”

“Race is a lie built on a lie. The first lie is that people are different, somehow skin color or hair texture is more significant than eye color, or the shape of one's feet. The second lie built on top of that is that there's a hierarchy that more significant difference, the color showing up as brown on your skin rather than brown in your hair, or whatever, is somehow more significant and there's some sort of hierarchy. That the lighter you are, the straighter your hair, the better you are.”

“Black people are just constantly immature in their thinking, undisciplined, and we suffer as a people. This is not about race in the sense that black people got to get something better than whites or Latinos or Asians. This is just basically that we keep complaining about what we don't have and what we can't do, and then, when we get in positions to do stuff, we fight amongst ourselves like savages.”

“No person who examines and reflects, can avoid seeing that there is but one race of people on the earth, who differ from each other only according to the soil and the climate in which they live.”

“The spirit of Dr. [Martin Luther] King and the thousands of people he worked with set the races on a different course in the United States... In that same spirit, we must have the courage - and teach our students the courage - to be bearers to the world of this transforming love, co-creators of a more deeply human world, collaborators with Christ in the building of God's Kingdom.”

“If colleges wanted to admit only legacies, or only tuba players, or only people who got astonishingly low SAT scores ' to ensure some of their graduates would be U.S. senators one day ' the Constitution wouldn't stop them. What the states, including state colleges, cannot do under the Constitution is discriminate on the basis of race.”

“In politics, people throw around the word 'friend' so much it often has little real meaning. This is not one of those times, when I call Jeb Bush my friend, I mean he is someone I like, care for and respect. He and I have worked closely together for many years, on issues big and small. He is a passionate advocate for what he believes, and I welcome him to the race.”

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

“As a writer, being produced and getting credits is essential: it's like being a horse running a race - and if the movie is a success, then your horse won and people were right to bet on it. From my experience, and a lot of others have done it, it's the best way to start out in the industry and get recognition, which will then get you more work, and later on will allow you to do your own movies.”

“How often in life are you going to find your mate and that mate happens to be your same exact age and happens to have had the same life experiences to match where you are in our life so you guys can meet perfectly and give society what it wants? It just doesn't happen that way. Some people evolve at 24, some people are 60 and are still evolving. So why are we stopping these great connections based on age, or race or colour or whatever, gender, whatever? You meet who you meet and you connect because of your life experience.”

“There is no doubt that the issue of race is always present in American politics and in the politics of any multiracial society. There is also no doubt that for some people it is an element in the manifested hostility to Obama. But I don't think it is the major theme at all. Obama is right when he reminds people: By the way, I was black before the election.”

“I’ve never treated anyone badly or in a discriminatory way based on their gender, race, religion or sexuality - period. I don’t blame some people for thinking that though, from the garbage they heard on those leaked tapes, which have been edited. You have to put it all in the proper context of being in an irrationally, heated discussion at the height of a breakdown, trying to get out of a really unhealthy relationship. It’s one terribly, awful moment in time, said to one person, in the span of one day and doesn’t represent what I truly believe or how I’ve treated people my entire life.”

“To have one's race brutally treated for so many years, even after the end of slavery and segregation, people are going to rise up with violence to attain what they believe is rightfully theirs. The most important thing at this time is raising the awareness of everyone; people need to be educated everywhere about all aspects of racism and how it affects people still today.”

“The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.”