I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my views became more conservative. But …

- Shelby Steele

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

- Shelby Steele

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.

- Shelby Steele

The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

- Shelby Steele

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

- Shelby Steele

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.

- Shelby Steele

Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites that has no…

- Shelby Steele

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

- Shelby Steele

Barack Obama's strategy is to get away from anything having to do with race as quickly as he can. His fear is that that might open a Pandora's Box.

- Shelby Steele