I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. – Muhammad Ali, 1967, refusing to fight in Vietnam
I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats. – Woody Allen, on the Ku Klux Klan
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it. – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family. – Saul Alinsky
Bigotry: A vice confined to the weakest minds. – Anonymous, Aphorisms; or, A Glance at Human Nature, in Original Maxims, 1820
When it is not on the side of civil rights, then the law is not right, it is white. – Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
Where do you think Id be next week if I didnt know how to shout and holler and make the public take notice? Id be poor and Id probably be down in my home town, washing windows or running an elevator and saying – Muhammad Ali
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. – James Baldwin
Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make. – Ruth Benedict
Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior. – Steve Biko
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line — the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War. – W. E. B. Du Bois
Racism? But isnt it only a form of misanthropy? – Joseph Brodsky
I wasnt always black… There was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger. – Bill Cosby
When Negroes are average, they fail, unless they are very, very lucky. Now, if youre average and white, honey, you can go far. Just look at Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored hed be washing dishes somewhere. – Annie Elizabeth Delany
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. – Albert Einstein
In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point, here and over the world. – Medgar Evers
When a black Jacksonian looks about his home community, he sees a city of over 150,000, of which 40% is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, or fireman. – Medgar Evers
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. – Frantz Fanon
What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesnt see Negroes hanging from its branches. – Jean Genet
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. – E. J. Hobsbawm
