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|  African Proverb | Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet. | |
| Mohammed Ali | The man who has no imagination has no wings. | |
| Mohammed Ali | The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life. | |
| Angolan Proverb | The one who throws the stone forgets; the one who is hit remembers forever. | |
| Arthur Ashe | True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | I promise you a police car on every sidewalk. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather. | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary? | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa? | |
| Mayor Marion Barry | If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate. | |
| Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr. | We, Negro Americans,
sing with all loyal Americans:\\
My country 'tis of thee,\\
Sweet land of liberty,\\
Of thee I sing.\\
Land where my fathers died,\\
Land of the Pilgrims' pride\\
From every mountainside\\
Let freedom ring!\\ \\
That's exactly what we mean --
from every mountain side, let freedom ring.
Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains
of Vermont and New Hampshire;
not only from the Catskills of New York;
but from the Ozarks in Arkansas,
from the Stone Mountain in Georgia,
from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
-- let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States,
but for the disinherited of all the earth --
may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside,
LET FREEDOM RING! | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like. | |
| Shirley Chisholm | It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. | |
| Dr. Kenneth Clark | The last damn thing blacks should do is get into the vanguard of banning books. The next step is banning blacks... | |
| George Clinton | Think! It ain't illegal 'yet.' | |
| Bill Cosby | I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | If there ever are great revolutions there,
they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil.
That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions
but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people anti-Semitic. | |
| Bo Diddley | Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash. | |
| Frederick Douglass | To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. | |
| Frederick Douglass | He who would be free must strike the first blow. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. | |
| Frederick Douglass | To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What is possible for me is possible for you. | |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind. | |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | The cost of liberty is less than the cost of repression. | |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. | |
| Joycelyn Elders | It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school. | |
| Frantz Fanon | Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.
It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. | |
| Billie Holiday | You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation. | |
| Billie Holiday | I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music. | |
| Billie Holiday | I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. | |
| Rev. Jesse Jackson | America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread. | |
| James Weldon Johnson | Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune. | |
| Florynce Kennedy | You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun. | |
| Florynce Kennedy | Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day! | |
| Alan Keyes | Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image. | |
| Alan Keyes | The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well. | |
| Alan Keyes | ...[A] prohibition on moral judgments against various sexual behaviors is a violation of the freedom, even of the religious liberty, of those who view such behavior as wrong. If we don't have a right to act according to our religious belief by forming judgments according to those beliefs about human conduct and behavior, then, exactly what does the free exercise of religion mean? Can the free exercise of religion really mean simply that I have the right to believe that God has ordained certain things to be right or wrong but that I can't act accordingly? Surely free exercise means the freedom to act according to belief. And, yet, if we are not allowed to act according to belief when it comes to fundamental moral precepts, then what will be the moral implications of religion? None at all. But if we accept an understanding of religious liberty that doesn't permit us to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in our own actions and those of others, haven't we in fact permitted the government to dictate to us a uniform approach to religion? And, isn't that dictation of uniformity in religion exactly what the First Amendment intended to forbid? | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element -- learning. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that one day
this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
'We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.' ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | A man who won't die for something is not fit to live. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. | |