Quotations on Racism
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The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals, which they serve. Indeed, if one examines the relationship between nations, as well as between individuals, one comes to the conclusion that objectivity is the exception, and a greater or lesser degree of narcissistic distortion is the rule Source: Mohandas K. Gandhi |
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It is not by confining one's neighbor that one is convinced of one's own sanity. Source: Albert Einstein |
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A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others. Source: Albert Einstein |
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To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject. Source: Ideas and Opinions Larry Elliott |
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'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore", says the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door"... The sentiments expressed on the Statue of Liberty represent an unattainable ideal, as they always did, but they were more noble than today's credo: "Give me your euro-dollar swaps, your forex dealers yearning to get rich. The rest of you sod off." Source: Monday September 10, 2001 The Guardian Mary Ann Evans, whose pen name was George Eliot |
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Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count to three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. The limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed. Source: Frantz Fanon |
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I, the man of colour, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. Source: Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. Nuruddin Farah |
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I am a community of no less than a thousand. I am not an I. I I am a country of persons. Source: Speech before the 27th African LIterature Association, 2001, referencing the impact of "elective relationships" Fanon Frantz |
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The Western bourgeoisie has prepared enough fences and railings to have no real fear of the competition of those whome it exploits and regards in contempt. Western bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt; it is a racism which minimises what it hates. Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the proclamation of an essential equality between men, manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie. Source: Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth. Jerry Fresia |
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"Ideologically then, there are three obstacles to effective radical politics. They are 1.respect for the Constitution as a fair and equitable and democratic document; 2. the underlying belief that the US government is fair, acts justly, or would under ordinary circumstances; and 3. a reluctance on the part of most citzens whose values are at odds with those expressed by corporate and state policy to engage in confrontation...while we live on the edge of conflict, we live on the edge of history...when we intercede as 'peacekeepers' and stop the action of protestors because it is confrontational while at the same time we fail to do the same to agents of the state whom with our own eyes we watch commit violence, then we are peackeepers of a particular species. We are peace officers. We are police." Source: Toward an American Revolution, Exposing the constitution & Other Illusions Eric Fromm |
(When asked his opinion of Western civilization): I think it would be a good idea. Source: Mohandas Ghandi
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"A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast" Source: Autobiography Emma Goldman |
"The most violent element in society is ignorance" Source: Emma Goldman |
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. Source: Emma Goldman
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Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.... Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others Source: Ben Harper |
As long as someone else controls your history the truth shall remain just a mystery Source: Frank Herbert
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Atrocity is recognized as such by victem and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating arguments. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself--a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities this bred. Source: KENNY HILDEBRANDT |
REAL PEOPLE, REAL PAIN, BUT FOR A FEW, AND THEIR GLUTONOUS GAIN Source: Hillel
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If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? Source: Sam Houston
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The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government. Source: Langston Hughes
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That justice is a blind goddess/ Is a thing to which we poor are wise/ Her bandage hides two festering sores/ That once, perhaps, were eyes./ Source: Aldous Huxley
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To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero worship, if the circumstances are favorable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they are unfavorable, of persecuting a scapegoat Source: Thomas Jefferson
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"the two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice & fear. after the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us . . . ." Source: Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, August 13, 1786 Florence Kennedy |
Nail polish or false eyelashes isn't politics. If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don't take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged colored lady. My politics don't depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra. Source: Martin Luther King
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"We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism." Source: Dyson, Michael Eric. I Might Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: The Free Press, 2000. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up. HUman progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... We are now faced with the fact that TOMORROW is TODAY. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of NOW. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there *is* such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. THIS IS A TIME FOR VIGOROUS AND POSITIVE ACTION." Source: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people. Source: Martin Luther King, Jr.
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A piece of freedom is no longer enough for human beings... unlike bread, a slice of liberty does not finish hunger. Freedom is like life. It cannot be had in installments. Freedom is indivisible - we have it all, or we are not free. Source: Peter Kropotkin
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Without equity there is no justice, and without justice there is no morality." Source: Ethics: Origin and Development, 1st Edition, George G. Harrap & Co., LTD., London, Calcutta, and Sydney 1924 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/ethics/toc.html Abraham Lincoln
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I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races….I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. Source: Wilma Mankiller
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Contrary to today’s stereotypes, racists do not always chew tobacco and drive pickup trucks with gun racks. They wear silk shirts, treat women as possessions, and talk about human rights at cocktail parties far from communities of people of color. The men in pickup trucks are just as likely to be as warm and caring as the high minded liberals are to be racists Source: Bob Marley
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Don't gain the world and lose your soul / (Just don't lose your soul) / Wisdom is better than silver and gold. Source: "Zion Train" marley/selassie
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"until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior has been finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war." Source: "war" Karl Marx
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"...work, as long as it is oppressed in a black skin, will never become free in a white skin" Source: H.L. Mencken
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Samuel Johnson's saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has some truth in it but not nearly enough. Patriotism, in truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels, and its annual output is probably greater than that of even religon. Its chief glories are the demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels and false history. Its philosophy rests firmly on the doctrine that the end justifies the means--that any blow, whether above or below the belt, is fair against dissenters from its wholesale denial of plain facts. Source: H.L. Mencken
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For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble and necessary to the common weal, has no assurance that it will sustain him while he stands ready to practice it, or keep him out of the poorhouse when illness or age makes him idle. Source: "Hard Times" The Baltimore Evening Sun, March 23, 1931, found in "The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories," edited by Marion Elizabeth Rogers John Stuart Mill
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So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary and that everything which is usual appears natural Source: John Milton
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Those who put out the people's eyes, reproach them for their blindness. Source: Chandra Mohanty
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Define home "not as a comforable, stable, inherited and familiar space, but instead as an imaginative, politically-charged space where the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice as well as a vision for radical transformation." Source: Scott Nearing
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If things are not right, we have no business turning aside until we have done our share and more than our share in our efforts to set them right. Source: The Conscience of a Radical in the Foreword entitled "My Conscience and I" Satch Ockmayknh
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"Charity is no substitute for justice witheld." Source: St. Augustine Finian O'Toole
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We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug. Source: The Irish Times, 5 May 1994 Octavio Paz
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We dissimulate in order to deceive ourselves, and turn transparent and phantasmal. But that is not the end of it: we also pretend that our fellow-man does not exist. This is not to say that we deliberately ignore or discount him. Our dissimulation here is a great deal more radical: we change him from somebody into nobody, into nothingness. And this nothingness takes on its own individuality, with a recognizable face and figure, and suddenly becomes Nobody. Don No One, who is Nobody's Spanish father, is able, well-fed, well-respected; he has a bank account, and speaks in a loud, self-assured voice. Don No One fills the world with his empty, garrulous presence. He is everywhere, and has friends everywhere. He is a banker, an ambassador, a businessman. He can be seen in all the salons, and is honored in Jamaica and Stockholm and London. He either holds office or wields influence, and his manner of not-being is aggressive and conceited. On the other hand, Nobody is quiet, timid, and resigned. He is also intelligent and sensitive. He always smiles. He always waits. When he wants to say something, he meets a wall of silence; when he greets someone, he meets a cold shoulder; when he pleads or weeps or cries out, his gestures and cries are lost in the emptiness created by Don No One's interminable chatter. Nobody is afraid to exist: he vacillates, attempting now and then to become Somebody. Finally, in the midst of his useless gestures, he disappears into the limbo from which he emerged. It would be a mistake to believe that others prevented him from existing. They simply dissimulate his existence and behave as if he did not exist. They nullify him, cancel him out, turn him to nothingness. It is futile for Nobody to talk, to publish books, to paint pictures, to stand on his head. Nobody is the blankness in our looks, the pauses in our conversations, the reserve in our silences. He is the name we always and inevitably forget, the eternal absentee, the guest we never invite, the emptiness we can never fill. He is an omission, and yet he is forever present. He is our secret, our crime, and our remorse. Thus the person who creates Nobody, by denying Somebody's existence, is also changed into Nobody. And if we are all Nobody, then none of us exists. The circle is closed and the shadow of Nobody spreads out over our land, choking the Gesticulator and covering everything. Silence-the prehistoric silence, stronger than all the pyramids and sacrifices, all the churches and uprising and popular songs-comes back to rule over Mexico. Source: The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950, p. 44 U. Utah Phillips
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The state can't give you freedom, and the state can't take it away. Freedom is something you're born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free. Source: Daniel Ransom
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It's a sad indication of societal decay when the only time one hears from a friend is when there's a new pyramid scheme in circulation. Source: the author directly Paul Robeson
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The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. Source: Gravestone of Paul Robeson. Maximilien Robespierre I condemn the business men only to the punishment of letting their fellow men live. Source: Eleanor Roosevelt
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No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Source: Salman Rushdie
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The immigrant is not simply transformed. He also transforms his new world. Source: World Press Review, May 2000 Edward Said
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American politics are deeply contradictory of course, but anti-intellectualism . . . is the common strain. This includes a deep suspicion of anything that isn't simple, fundamental, traditional, down-to-earth and "American" in the ideological sense, and can be exploited easily by demagogues and cynical politicians of the right. The key word is "freedom", which includes the freedom to own and use firearms, the freedom to trade and use the marketplace without restraint even if it means serious injury to health and decency, the freedom above all to make America's will rule all over the earth Source: George Santayana
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My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests Source: Jean-Paul Sartre
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We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world—-of everything except the Jews. Source: Tupac Shakur
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"You don't have to be in jail to be doing time." Source: Ariel Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister
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I will tell you something: Years ago, I would watch when a group of Palestinian workers would sit down to eat in a circle and each of them would take out what he brought from home and place it in the center of the circle, and then, with restraint, one would take from here and another from there, and they all sat together. While as for our people, each of them would sit by himself and eat his food alone. When I watched the Palestinians, they made me envious. Both the culture of eating and the restraint alike. The Jews as individuals are extraordinarily talented, with a really far-reaching imagination. But as a nation I wouldn't give us a very high grade. Source: Ari Shavit, Sharon is Sharon is Sharon, Ha’aretz Magazine, 4/12/01
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Al Sharpton and I don't care how controversial it makes us. I won't tolerate being insulted. If you piss in my face I'm gonna call it piss. I'm not gonna call it rain. Source: Fires in the Mirror, by Anna Deavere Smith
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George Bernard Shaw We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for? Source: Living Graves, published 1951
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George Bernard Shaw Custom will reconcile people to any antrocity. Source: Bumper Sticker
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Definition of a Saint: A dead liberal worshipped by living conservatives. Source: Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897
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But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one: men know him not--and to know not is to care not for. Source: Peter tosh
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"Live for yourself you will live in vain Live for others and you will live again" Source: From "Pass it on" by the Jamaican reggae band The Wailers Calvin Trillin
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At the time, guerrillas fighting for Algerian independence [from France] were using Tunisia as a safe haven, and French generals were threatening to cross the Tunisian border in "hot pursuit." The French troops that were still based in Tunisia from the days before Tunisian independence were allowed to remain on the condition that they not leave their garrisons. I then had a temporary job in the Time bureau in Paris--its duties and origins were unclear to all of us--and the bureau chief decided that, as ignorant as I was, I could at least serve to phone the office if I noticed swarms of French soldiers shooting people in the streets of Tunis….English reporters casually talked about their plans to heat up the conflict a bit the next day, or maybe tone it down; what actually was happening seemed almost irrelevant to them. The most brazenly inventive of the Englishmen-I'll call him Simpson-liked to boast about not leaving the hotel, "Just a bunch of Frogs chasing a bunch of Wogs," he often said, to explain why the situation did not justify undue exertion. "You can't keep these colored people off each other's necks." Source: London fogged, Brill's Content, January 2001, p.69, 71.
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Mark Twain There are many humurous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than other savages. Source: Mark Twain
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There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it Source: Mo Tzu
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The task of the human-hearted man is to procure benefits for the world and to eliminate its calamities. Now among all the current calamities of the world, which are the greatest? I say that attacks on small states by large ones, disturbances of small houses by large ones, oppression of the weak by the strong, misuse of the few by the many, deception of the simple by the cunning, and disdain toward the humble by the honored: these are the misfortunes of the world Source: unknown
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What does Planned Parenthood mean by "reproductive choice" if reproductive choice does not include the choice to reproduce? If an abortion is a "private choice," why is the choice to give bith an international incident when it happens in a developing country? Source: Unknown Unkown
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The law doth punish man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ But lets the greater felon loose/ Who steals the common from the goose! Source: 17th century English peasant saying
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Kurt Vonnegut Please -- a little less love, and a little more common decency. (Slapstick, 1976, p 33) Source: Alice Walker
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The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. Source: foreword to The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, 1988. Sonam Wangchuk |
"the products of (the) modern education system...unlike their parents' generation, they can not work with the animals to produce their own clothing...they can not build their own house, and..they can not even repair what their forefathers made. Yet, interestingly, somehow they are filled with such arrogance about some 'modern education' that they can make those who can do all such things, feel stupid, inferior and 'uneducated'" Source: John Wayne
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I don't feel we did wrong taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themseleves. Source: Eudora Welty
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My wish, my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgement but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight. Source: as quoted in "Newsweek" 06 Aug 2001, p.60 Bernard White
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Stay strong and pay close attention Source: Christa Wolf
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"I believe that our culture goes back to the ancient Greeks and to several other societies whose roots lie in this Greek civilization. There is one thing that these various cultures have in common: they are built on a very hierarchical system that has excluded women from power and influence. They developed an increasing competition for material gains, producing societies that became more and more void and empty. I think this is one of the causes of the drive toward self-destruction." Christa Wolf (1983) Source: Danielle Wolfe
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I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war, that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. Source:
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