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

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

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

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

I’m a warrior for the middle class.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

I love diversity.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor – over each other.

I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there’s no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That’s all crap.

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.

I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews – everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.

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

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

Our country does not believe in the concept of your God and my God. We believe that all gods are one. We have different ways of accepting Him. All ways lead to Him.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

Neither the Christian attitude of love for all mankind nor humane hopes for an organized society must cause us to forget that the ‚human stratum‘ may not be homogeneous.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

The ideals and principles for which Dr King fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

One of the things that I have admired about India is the spiritualism of the people.

After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.