Best 4508 quotes in «race quotes» category

Why does a government agency that has no connection with my community have the right to dictate what is appropriate for it?

Why [...] is it so hard to build a society in which race does not matter? To the extent that Americans even ask themselves this question, they would say that it is because Americans--whites, especially--have not tried hard enough. And yet, how much harder can a people try? Today, after 50 years of trying, most whites cannot muster much more than exhausted resignation in the face of reports on school resegregation and yawning gaps in test scores or poverty rates. [...] If, generation after generation, Americans tend to segregate themselves, is it possible that the expectations for integration were not reasonable? If diversity is a source of tension are there risks in basing policies on the assumption that it is a strength? If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?

With my white friends, I’m always half Mexican. They never say I’m half Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway from the standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.

Work for interracial justice is of its own nature interracial. It bespeaks the co-operation of both races, not in a merely formal, “token” fashion, but as a genuine and sincere co-operation, based upon real friendship and personal, day-by-day collaboration.

Writing comes out of the rift between what we have experienced and the language we've been given to express it. We write to bridge this divide, to find word adequate to our sense of reality... Creative writing is the search for and creation of a language that will express what the writer unconsciously knows but does not yet have a language to express.

Xenophobia is when you smile at people and they don't smile back.

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us, very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

You and I, my son, are that "below." That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.

You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat.

You are not just white, but a rainbow of colors. You are not just black, but golden. You are not just a nationality, but a citizen of the world. You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong. You are not just rich or poor, but always wealthy in the mind and heart. You are not perfect, but flawed. You are flawed, but you are just. You may just be human, but you are also a magnificent reflection of God.

You do not know black if you haven’t been shot. Being black is great target practice.

You do not enter a race to lose

You can marry outside of your race, but never marry outside of your values.

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.

You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy." "Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.

You don't have to race with anyone if you learn to create your own lane.

You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

You honkies want women to be like cookies, all sweet and dainty and easy to eat. But I'm fry bread, you bitch, and I'm proud of it.

You know why the gods made people in different colors?" "No, why" Kate asked. "Too boring, everybody looking the same. The gods didn't want us to get bored.

Your creation by your creator is white but one way or the other you find yourself amongst the black race. No matter how you tried to make it perfect it will never be. God is not human.

You ought to endure and complete your own race of life.

(About events he will take part in) I vaulted today, and I'll throw the discus tomorrow around one o' clock. Then I'll race in the 100-meter final at 3:45 on Saturday.

Your life is such that you are running a race against a diminishing life.

Your race is your diminishing life

A basic assumption shapes most Americans’ mindset about labor: the belief that the death of unions isn’t my problem because I’m not in a union. That assumption is wrong. Even if you aren’t a member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

A big part of the Republican 2016 race is now basically a bunch of establishment Republicans going after each other. Jeb Bush going after Marco Rubio, and the governors, Chris Christie going after Marco Rubio. Rubio firing back, John Kasich going after Jeb Bush.

Accordingly, one race is neither superior nor inferior to another.

A cat is a cat. She has no race creed or collar.

You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.

Your own forefathers killed to have and hold the land where you were born, and sought to extinguish the memories and souls of those that were slain. What of those who prayed in the mountains of Appalachia for thousands of years? That to me is an abomination, although it is the way of men.

Your race does not determine how far you go in life, your determination does.

You should never let a word control you, intimidate you, or make you uncomfortable, and that applies to people of all races. Intent is where insult lies, and hate. Not in language.

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.

Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.

Absolutely no bedwetting liberals or race warlords were harmed or mistreated in the creation of this web page - though the temptation was certainly very tough to resist.

A calling is you feel - you look out and see the need - maybe it's the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it's the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was - felt called.

Accepted in Christ, we now run the race 'for the joy that is set before us' rather than 'for fear that comes behind us'.

Acceptance of race mixture was more developed in Arab culture than in Jewish culture.

According to the brain-centered model of exercise performance, a runner achieves his race goal when his brain calculates that achieving the race goal is possible without catastrophic self-harm.

A certain portion of the human race has certainly a taste for being diddled.

A day of peace and sharing can lead to greater understanding and cooperation among political parties, faith groups, and people of different races and economic class.

A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.

A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold.

A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet.

Acting is broad enough a church that you can pick your races, decide which way you want to go at different times.I think that the story and circumstance tends to dictate the most and then what you do with your own approach after that.

Actually, television tells you to take dope. It tells you to destroy the human race really, by first having more consumers and then consuming more poison and then making the whole planet uninhabitable.

Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.

Adolescent stage in the development of the human race from which humanity should free itself.

A dog is not almost-human, and I know of no greater insult to the canine race than to describe it as such.