Quotes on Social Justice

Race prejudice is the devil unchained.

The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.

No higher duty, or more solemn responsibility, rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution - of whatever race, creed or persuasion.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.

To be born in a free society and not to be born free is to be born into a lie. To be told by co-citizens and co-Christians that you have no value, no history, have never done anything that is worthy of human respect destroys you because in the beginning you believe it.

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence.

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.

I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't. We haven't.

I try to learn as much as I can because I know nothing compared to what I need to know.

Tolerance and understanding won't 'trickle down' in our society any more than wealth does.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.