Racism Quotes

My respect for human beings is based not on the colour of a man's skin nor authority he may wield, but purely on merit.

The so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system.

We cannot blame other people for our troubles. We are not victims of the influx of foreign people into South Africa. We must remember that it was mainly due to the aggressive and hostile policies of the apartheid regime that the economic development of our neighbours was undermined.

We are extricating ourselves from a system that insulted our common humanity by dividing us from one another on the basis of race and setting us against each other as oppressed and oppressor. That system committed a crime against humanity.

Why is it that in this courtroom I face a white magistrate, am confronted by a white prosecutor and escorted into the dock by a white orderly? Can anyone honestly and seriously suggest that in this type of atmosphere the scales of justice are evenly balanced?

If you sit down and talk to a person, it's easy to convince him that apartheid can never save a country and will lead to the slaughtering of innocent people - including his own people.

I discovered even before I went to jail that apartheid was not run by people who were monolithic in their approach. Some of them didn't even believe in apartheid.

We of the ANC had always stood for a non-racial democracy, and we shrank from any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were.

I hope that our movement will always hold that commitment to non-racialism dear in its thoughts, policies and actions. It is that commitment, even in circumstances wherewe could have been pardoned for deviating from it, that amongst other things earned us the respect of the world.

I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize - I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to - segregation and discrimination.

The darkness of racial injustice will be dispelled only by the light of forgiving love.

While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.

We must never substitute a doctrine of Black supremacy for white supremacy. For the doctrine of Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy.

The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.

It is one of the strange ironies of history, that in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal, men are still arguing over whether the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character.

I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day, right down in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to live together as brothers.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

It is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation.

The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.