Race quotes
4.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside race — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"All wishes create an upswing line when it is manifested. Therefore, together, it becomes an incredible upswing of power, whatever you wished. Of course, the more high level wishes, which covers the whole human race is stronger than wishing for getting ice cream for your dessert!"
"The diverse religions and races bring beauty to the world if we truly understand in our hearts the essence of who we are and what we stand for. And that really is the essence of spirituality."
"Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes. "The serum will go into effect in one minute," he says. "Be brave, Tris." My heart begins to race. Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all?"
"I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism."
"Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race, to grow and mature."
"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."
"The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power."
"The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself."
"The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe."
"Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him."
"Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations withthem, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them."
"It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears."
"There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race."
"When I walk up the piazza of Santa Croce I feel as if it were not a Florentine nor an European church but a church built by and for the human race."
"It is very certain that the strong British race which has now overrun much of this continent, must also overrun [Texas], and Mexico and Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions and methods it was done."
"When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea--that conserves it; ideas only save races."
"Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty."
"Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out."
"I'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary."
"If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, 'When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.'"
