Quotes on Diversity

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

What a tiresome place America would be if freedom meant we all had to think alike or be the same color or wear the same gray flannel suit! That road leads to the conformity of the graveyard!

He who is able to conquer others is powerful; he who is able to conquer himself is more powerful.

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

The question is one of fighting the causes and not just being satisfied with getting rid of the effects.

We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad.

All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.

Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.

True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.

Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.