Malcolm X
Civil Rights Activist, Minister
"America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt."
Lynching quotes
Lynching
73 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Malcolm X
Civil Rights Activist, Minister
"American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine."
Peter Drucker
Management Consultant, Author
"Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you."
Bryan Stevenson
Lawyer, Author
"Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent."
Bryan Stevenson
Lawyer, Author
"In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it."
Explore further
Topics related to Lynching
Browse quotes that often appear alongside lynching — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Lynching quotes (page 1 of 4)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"You can create whatever you want. You just have to know what you want and take the opportunities as they come your way. We are who we choose to be."
Read quote
29 likes
"The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me."
Read quote
22 likes
"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
Read quote
16 likes
"In my opinion while lynchings were quite possibly the most heinous crimes ever witnessed in American history, they helped in bringing people together for a sole purpose. It was because of these lynchings that armed self-resistance was created. If white people knew black people were capable of fighting back then there was less of a chance that violence actually would break out."
Read quote
15 likes
"Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us."
Read quote
14 likes
"I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of people who were enslaved. You couldn't see them as fully human and so you didn't respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that lynching represented."
Read quote
13 likes
"And weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and and playing guitar at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow."
Read quote
13 likes
"If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing."
Read quote
10 likes
"You are the sum total of your choices."
Read quote
8 likes
"It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smart-ass."
Read quote
6 likes
"We design our lives through the power of our choices. We feel most helpless when we've made choices by default, when we haven't designed our lives on our own."
Read quote
6 likes
"Nothing has to be accepted just because we inherited it."
Read quote
4 likes
"I rise today to offer a formal and heartfelt apology to all the victims of lynching in our history, and for the failure of the United States Senate to take action when action was most needed."
Read quote
4 likes
"There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre."
Read quote
4 likes
"America don't have no future! America's going to be destroyed! Allah's going to divinely chastise America! Violence, crimes, earthquakes - there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. America's going to pay for all its lynchings and killings of slaves and what it's done to black people."
Read quote
4 likes
"The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future."
Read quote
3 likes
"Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself."
Read quote
3 likes
"So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool."
Read quote
3 likes