Bad Hombres
(Or, Quotations on the Nature of Fear and Prejudice)
“We have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out.”
—Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America (b. 1946)
“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”
—George Orwell, English author and essayist (1903 – 1950), from 1984
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”
—George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America (1732 – 1799)
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
—H. L. Mencken, American satirist and cultural critic (1880 – 1956)
“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
—Kofi Annan, Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary-General of the United Nations (b. 1938)
“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, American author and educator (b. 1975)
“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’ . . . For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudices and hysterical appeal to fear.”
—Halford E. Luccock, American scholar and theologian (1885 – 1960)
“Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.”
—Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, American pastor and educator (1891 – 1976)
“Prejudice is the child of ignorance.”
—William Hazlitt, English author and essayist (1778 – 1830)
“Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist and author (1937 – 2005)
“Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.”
—Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist (1828 – 1910)
“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
—Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist (1879 – 1955)
“When we begin to build walls of prejudice, hatred, pride, and self-indulgence around ourselves, we are more surely imprisoned than any prisoner behind concrete walls and iron bars.”
—Mother Angelica, American Catholic nun and television host (1923 – 2016)
“Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.”
—Ben Hecht, American author and screenwriter (1894 – 1964)
“Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.”
—Hebrew Proverb
“Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
“It’s an universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author and historian (1918 – 2008)
“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and statesman (1749 – 1832)
“The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
—Mark Twain, American author and humorist (1835 – 1910)
“Ignorance gives a sort of eternity to prejudice, and perpetuity to error.”
—Reverend Robert Hall, English Baptist minister (1764 – 1831)
“What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.”
—Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist (1879 – 1955)
“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’”
—Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist and poet (1930 – 2013)
“Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists—not on a religion, and not a civilization. As we wage this war to defend our principles, we must live up to those principles ourselves. And one of the deepest commitments of America is tolerance. No one should be treated unkindly because of the color of their skin or the content of their creed. No one should be unfairly judged by appearance or ethnic background, or religious faith.”
—George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America (b. 1946)
“Prejudice squints when it looks, and lies when it talks.”
—Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès, French memoirist (1784 – 1838)
“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.”
—Allan Bloom, American philosopher (1930 – 1992)
“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security for the minorities.”
—Lord Acton, English historian and author (1834 – 1902)
“You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”
—Clarence Darrow, American lawyer and civil rights advocate (1857 – 1938)
“Prejudice is opinion without judgement.”
—Voltaire, French Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694 – 1778)
“I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust . . . We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.”
—Thurgood Marshall, American lawyer and Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court (1908 – 1993)
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
—Audre Lorde, American writer and civil rights activist (1934 – 1992)
“When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.”
—Bette Davis, American actress (1908 – 1989)
“Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.”
—Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist (1928 – 2012)
“When the judgement’s weak, The prejudice is strong.”
—Kane O’Hara, Irish composer and playwright (1712 – 1782)
“Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.”
—Anton Chekhov, Russian author and playwright (1860 – 1904)
“I take issue with many people’s description of people being ‘Illegal’ Immigrants. There aren’t any illegal Human Beings as far as I’m concerned.”
—Dennis Kucinich, American politician (b. 1946)
“Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.”
—Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist (1879 – 1955)
“He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”
—Anatole France, French poet and novelist (1844 – 1924)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf, Modernist English author (1882 – 1941)
“Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.”
—Wendell Phillips, American attorney and activist (1811 – 1884)
“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
—Robert Orben, American speechwriter and humorist (b. 1927)
“When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.”
—Charles Evans Hughes, Sr., American author and politician (1862 – 1948)
“Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex.”
—Mahatma Gandhi, Indian social activist and leader of the Indian independence movement (1869 – 1948)
“The divide of race has been America’s constant curse. Each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction, are no different. They have nearly destroyed us in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. They torment the lives of millions in fractured nations around the world. These obsessions cripple both those who are hated and, of course, those who hate, robbing both of what they might become.”
—William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America (b. 1946)
“Prejudice is the reason of fools.”
—Voltaire, French Enlightenment author and philosopher (1694 – 1778)
“Denying racism is the new racism.”
—Bill Maher, American comedian and political commentator (b. 1956)
“But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.”
—Zadie Smith, English author and essayist (b. 1975)
“Everyone’s quick to blame the alien.”
—Aeschylus, Greek dramatist (525 – 456 BC)
“No prejudice has even been able to prove its case in the court of reason.”
—Mark Twain, American author and humorist (1835 – 1910)
“Anyone who calls you ‘little lady’ has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”
—Neil Gaiman, English author (b. 1960)
“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
—Lucretia Mott, American reformer and women’s rights activist (1793 – 1880)
“Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
—William James, American philosopher and psychologist (1842 – 1910)
“The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.”
—John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America (1917 – 1963)
“Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.”
—Mahatma Gandhi, Indian social activist and leader of the Indian independence movement (1869 – 1948)
“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, American novelist (b. 1962), from Choke
“The intensity of the frenzy is the most hopeful feature of this disgraceful exhibition—of hysterical, unintelligent fear—which is quite foreign to the generous American nature. It will pass like the Know-nothing days, but the sense of shame and sin should endure.”
—Louis D. Brandeis, American lawyer and Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court (1856 – 1941)
“Justice delayed is justice denied.”
—William E. Gladstone, English politician and Prime Minister (1809 – 1898)
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.”
—Robert Frost, American poet (1874 – 1963)
“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”
—Mark Twain, American author and humorist (1835 – 1910), from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
—Nelson Mandela, South African anti-apartheid activist; President of South Africa (1918 – 2013)
“Remember, when the judgment is weak the prejudice is strong.”
—Kane O’Hara, Irish composer and playwright (1712 – 1782)
“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
—George Orwell, English author and essayist (1903 – 1950), from Animal Farm
“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”
—Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet and novelist (b. 1939)
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
—Marie Curie, Polish-born French physicist and chemist (1867 – 1934)
“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”
—Harper Lee, American author (1926 – 2016), from To Kill a Mockingbird
“How a minority,
Reaching a majority, Seizing authority,
Hates a minority!”
—Leonard H. Robbins, American poet (1877 – 1947)
“They shouldn’t teach their immigrants’ kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it only makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.”
—James Jones, American novelist (1921 – 1977), from From Here to Eternity
“The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.”
—Anita Hill, American attorney and academic (b. 1956)
“You have to admit that most women who have done something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.”
—Françoise Gilot, French artist and author (b. 1921)
“Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American transcendentalist essayist and poet (1803 – 1882)
“A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side.”
—Joseph Addison, English poet, publisher, and politician (1672 – 1719)
“However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.”
—Gloria Steinem, American journalist and political activist (b. 1934)
“We are not descended from fearful men.”
—Edward R. Murrow, American broadcast journalist (1908 – 1965)
“For more than forty years I have selected my collaborators on the basis of their intelligence and their character and not on the basis of their grandmothers, and I am not willing for the rest of my life to change this method which I have found so good.”
—Fritz Haber, German chemist (1868 – 1934)
“It is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.”
—Tacitus, Roman senator and historian (54 – 117 AD)
“Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.”
—George Washington Carver, Botanist, inventor, and one of the nation’s most influential African-American scientists (c. 1864 – 1943)
“Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.”
—Richard Aldington, English poet and novelist (1892 – 1962), from The Colonel’s Daughter
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”
—Charles de Gaulle, French general and statesman (1890 – 1970)
“To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.”
—William Faulkner, American novelist (1897 – 1962)
“They [the Irish] are looked upon with contempt for their want of aptitude in learning new things; they’re ready and ingenious lying; their eye-service. These are the faults of an oppressed race, which must require the aid of better circumstances through two or three generations to eradicate.”
—Margaret Fuller, American journalist and women’s rights activist (1810 – 1850)
“We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.”
—William Hazlitt, English author and essayist (1778 – 1830)
“Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.”
—Mary Douglas, English anthropologist (1921 – 2007)
“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”
—Honoré De Balzac, French novelist and playwright (1799 – 1850)
“If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.”
—Plutarch, Greek biographer (c. 46 – 120 AD)
“The majority has the might—more’s the pity—but it hasn’t the right. . . . The minority is always right.”
—Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright and poet (1828 – 1906)
“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
—Harper Lee, American author (1926 – 2016), from Go Set a Watchman
“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”
—Karl R. Popper, Austrian-born English philosopher (1902 – 1994)
“The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myths of its conquerors.”
—Meridel Le Sueur, American author and poet (1900 – 1996)
“A nation is judged by how it treats its minorities.”
—Rene Levesque, Canadian journalist and politician (1922 – 1987)
“He [Mao Zedong] was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other.”
—Jung Chang, Chinese-born English author (b. 1952)
“As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.”
—Frederick Douglass, American statesman, author, and abolitionist (1818 – 1895)
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America (1882 – 1945)
“The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.”
—George Bancroft, American statesman and diplomat (1800 – 1891)
“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.”
—James Baldwin, American novelist and essayist (1924 – 1987)
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
—Robert A. Heinlein, American science fiction author (1907 – 1988)
“Populism is on the increase—a populism that rejects anything different, anyone with a different-coloured skin, or a different race or religion. This is the real danger and unspoken risk that threatens to pollute democracy.”
—Jacques Delors, French economist and politician (b. 1925)
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
—James Thurber, American cartoonist and author (1894 – 1961)
“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink along the map turn red.”
—Marya Mannes, American journalist and critic (1904 – 1990)
“People are pretty much alike. It’s only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.”
—Linda Ellerbee, American journalist (b. 1944)
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
—Henry Adams, American historian (1838 – 1918)
“If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?”
—Sydney J. Harris, American journalist (1917 – 1986)
“In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.”
—Maya Angelou, American novelist and poet (1928 – 2014)
“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, ‘Now, you are free to go where you want, do what you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of the race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with the others.’”
—Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States of America (1908 – 1973)
“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
—Charlotte Brontë, English poet and novelist (1816 – 1855), from Jane Eyre
“Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. But I deny that any legislative body or judicial tribunal may have regard to the race of citizens when the civil rights of those citizens are involved.”
—Justice John Marshall Harlan, American lawyer and Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court (1833 – 1911)
“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.”
—William Ralph Inge, English author and Anglican priest (1860 – 1954)
“Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life.”
—Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician and diplomat (b. 1945)
“Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.”
—René Dubos, French-born American microbiologist (1901 – 1982)
“The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.”
—Eldridge Cleaver, American author and political activist (1935 – 1998)
“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”
—Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and author (1872 – 1970)
“Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.”
—G. K. Chesterton, English author and philosopher (1874 – 1936)
“The sure guarantee of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race.”
—Justice John Marshall Harlan, American lawyer and Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court (1833 – 1911)
“When we leave people out or write them off, we not only shortchange them and their dreams, we shortchange our country and our own futures.”
—Hillary Clinton, American politician and First Lady (b. 1947)
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
—Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and author (1872 – 1970)
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism . . . The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
—Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States of America (1858 – 1919)
“It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its citizens.”
—Pearl S. Buck, American novelist (1892 – 1973)
“A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.”
—Joseph Heller, American satirical novelist (1923 – 1999), from Catch-22
“Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind.”
—Joseph Addison, English poet, publisher, and politician (1672 – 1719)
“There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
—Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher (4 BC – 65 AD)
“His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.”
—Jesse Jackson, American civil rights activist (b. 1941)
“For as long as the power of America’s diversity is diminished by acts of discrimination and violence against people just because they are black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or gay, we still must overcome.”
—Ron Kind, American politician (b. 1963)
“Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.”
—George Sewell, English Actor (1924 – 2007)
“We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.”
—Charles Caleb Colton, English author and clergyman (1780 – 1832)
“We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.”
—Lionel Trilling, American literary critic (1905 – 1975)
“For happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it at all occasions their effectual support.”
—George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America (1732 – 1799)
“Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.”
—José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and essayist (1883 – 1955)
“Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth.”
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin, American preacher and magazine editor (1814 – 1880)
“Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
—Lucius Accius, Roman poet and scholar (170 – 86 BC), attributed
“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
—Michael Crichton, American novelist (1942 – 2008), from State of Fear
“No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America (1882 – 1945)
“I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man and forgets his colour or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe that the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law has made him equal, but man has not.”
—Clarence Darrow, American lawyer and civil rights advocate (1857 – 1938)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
—Edmund Burke, Irish statesman (1729 – 1797)
“The overwhelming condemnation makes it clear we have made enormous progress in teaching everyone that racism is bad. Where we seem to have dropped the ball is in teaching people what racism actually is . . . which allows people to say incredibly racist things while insisting they would never.”
—Jon Stewart, American comedian and political commentator (b. 1962)
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus, American Poet (1849 – 1887), inscription on the Statue of Liberty