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

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

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.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

Without forgiveness, there’s no future.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I go to school the youth to learn the future.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‚security,‘ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us thru that darkness to a safe and sane future.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Racism and sexism, misogyny and homophobia, they’re so visible. They’re out in the open. When they’re visible, it’s a lot easier to deal with them.

If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

It’s a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

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 U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

The future of American film lies on television.

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.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

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

There is no scriptural basis for segregation.

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated on the job.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

The white man is destroying the world.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

A great fortune is a great slavery.

Hate crime is not new in the United States.

Anti-Semitism is real in this country.

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

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

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.