America Quotes

I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.

Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community.

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. 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.

If America is to remain a first-class nation, it cannot have second-class citizens.

All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper."

Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.

If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.

I believe that we, as Negroes, are going to gain our freedom in America because the goal of America is freedom.

White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven't had to face. The other thing is that the color became a stigma. American society made the negro's color a stigma, and that can never be overlooked.

The other thing is that America freed the slaves in 19, I mean, 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave the slaves no land, or nothing in reality as a matter of fact, to get started on.

It refused to give its black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily, in chains, and had worked free for 244 years, any kind of economic base.

America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation.

Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America?

The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.

For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.