If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

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

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

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.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn’t white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

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

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

We’ve never advocated violence; violence is inflicted upon us. But we do believe in self-defense for ourselves and for black people.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

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.

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

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.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

If you see a black family, it’s looting, but if it’s a white family they are looking for food.

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

There is no scriptural basis for segregation.

It’s always going to be a fight for anyone who isn’t an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn’t have a fight.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

Any teammate of mine that had a kid and a boy that was capable of playing baseball, I think I set a terrific example of ‚Don’t do this‘ and ‚Don’t do that.‘ And that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.

Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

The capitalist system is about taking from the Earth and from the other great commodity, labour. What’s happening with this system is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the only way out of it is supposed to be growth. But growth is debt. It’s going to make the situation worse.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

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.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

The people are hungry: It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes.

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

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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.

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.

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.

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

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

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.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

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.

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

There is plenty of building material and more than enough manpower to make a decent home for every Cuban. But if we continue to wait for the golden calf, a thousand years will have gone by, and the problem will remain the same.