QUOTES
End Racism Quotes

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* Our goal is to have a country that's not divided by race.
-- Barack Obama

Our goal is to have a country that's not divided by race. And my impression, as I travel around the country, is that that's the kind of country that most people want, as well, and that we all have prejudice, we all have certain suspicions or stereotypes about people who are different from us, whether it's religious or racial or ethnic, but what I think I found in the American people, I think there's a core decency there, where if they take the time, if they get the time to know individuals, then they want to judge those individuals by their character.
-- Barack Obama

Is it not the interest of the human race, that every one should be so taught and placed, that he would find his highest enjoyment to arise from the continued practice of doing all in his power to promote the well-being, and happiness, of every man, woman, and child, without regard to their class, sect, party, country or colour"
-- Robert Owen

The whole system has not one redeeming quality; its very virtues, as they are termed, are vices of great magnitude. Its charities, so called, are gross acts of injustice and deception. Its instructions are to rivet ignorance in the mind and, if possible, render it perpetual. It supports, in all manner of extravagance, idleness, presumption, and uselessness; and oppresses, in almost every mode which ingenuity can devise, industry, integrity and usefulness. It encourages superstition, bigotry and fanaticism; and discourages truth, commonsense and rationality. It generates and cultivates every inferior quality and base passion that human nature can be made to receive; and has so disordered all the human intellects, that they have become universally perplexed and confused, so that man has no just title to be called a reasonable and rational being. It generates violence, robbery and murder, and extols and rewards these vices as the highest of all virtues. Its laws are founded in gross ignorance of individual man and of human society; they are cruel and unjust in the extreme, and, united with all the superstitions in the world, are calculated only to teach men to call that which is pre-eminently true and good, false and bad; and that which is glaringly false and bad, true and good. In short, to cultivate with great care all that leads to vice and misery in the mass, and to exclude from them, with equal care, all that would direct them to true knowledge and real happiness, which alone, combined, deserve the name of virtue.
-- Robert Owen

"I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don't think there is anything such as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you're happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven't reached that stage yet.
-- Rosa Parks

* Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future.
-- Eva Paterson

* O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.
-- William Penn

Accomplishments have no color.
-- Leontyne Price

"I feel closer to my country than ever. There is no longer a feeling of lonesome isolation. Instead--peace. I return without fearing prejudice that once bothered me . . . for I know that people practice cruel bigotry in their ignorance, not maliciously"
-- Paul Robeson

"Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man's literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear." And I saw, too, that the struggle for Negro rights was an inseparable part of the anti-fascist struggle and I said: "The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
-- Paul Robeson

To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

* ...we need to realize that we have a role to play in overcoming our own discrimination which is sometimes very subtly held...
-- Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia

Today in America as in other parts of the world we see a model of a society in which the powerful dominate. They marginalize and they go as far as to eliminate the weakest before the homogenization caused by this system of globalization. Through providence we have the taking of conscious cultural identity. As such the church has a special mission to be the defender and promoter of a culture of life. This culture of life assumes a preferential option for the poor, opposes or puts the globalization of solidarity in opposition to the globalization of the markets. It makes itself a voice for those who have no voice; denounces all violence, all racial discrimination; walks beside those condemned to the land, those that are displaced; is a promoter of integral development in the construction of peace in the search for justice and liberation. This culture of life is what is expressed as a service of hope. This urgency exists in this precise moment in which the indigenous person, conscious of being a subject to their own history, will not opt for a church that submerges them in a conflict where they have to live their faith being aware of expressing it within a dominant culture.
-- Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
-- Bertrand Russell

You don't fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.
-- Bobby Seale

* Every day we all make mistakes ourselves, but, and we all sometimes have some...harbor some prejudices and all, but we have to know in our heart it's wrong. And we all want to remember that we are connected. And that any kind of racism is wrong.
-- Russell Simmons

Antisemitism is just another form of racism. It's the same sickness, whether it's about Christians, about Islamophobia, which is horrible. It's all wrong. It's all the same.
-- Russell Simmons

 

* All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
-- Bishop John Shelby Spong

* This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
-- Gloria Steinem

* "How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.
-- Barbra Streisand

End Racism Quotes

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End Racism Day - March 21

 

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