I was born realizing the flaws in the criminal justice system.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed.

At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Sense perceptions can be and often are false and deceptive, however real they may appear to us. Where there is realization outside the senses, it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within.

The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.

The protestor I think will speak up for the world’s poorest.

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‚our‘ country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that’s been discriminated against, knows what it’s like.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

I personally have always been in favor of people who are gay being permitted to marry legally – and I still feel that way.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

It didn’t even occur to me that I’m the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They’ve made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, and anti-racism.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married – we became an interracial couple.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who’s spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.