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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"One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that."
"This is the 21st century, we are a highly evolved race, our capabilities are so great compared to what we are doing. We have been lulled into addiction and everything is built around it and you have to break out of it and think outside of the box."
"Of all the systems of the body - neurological, cognitive, special, sensory - the cardiological system is the most sensitive and easily disturbed. The role of society must be to shelter these systems from infection and decay, or else the future of the human race is at stake. Like a summer fruit that is protected from insect invasion, bruising, and rot by the whole mechanism of modern farming; so must we protect the heart."
"I can't say I believe in prizes. I was a whiz in the three-legged race - that's something you CAN win."
"It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race."
"It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential."
"All the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race nor alienate so much property as drunkenness."
"I appeal to the Youth and those on the ground: start talking to each other across divisions of race and political organizations."
"I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice."
"To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race."
"There is no being of any race who, if he finds the proper guide, cannot attain to virtue."
"I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy."
"Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals."
"One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end."
"At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that it defeats all categories and definitions."
"Nationalism must now be added to the refuse pile of superstitions. We are now citizens of the world, and the man who divides the race into elect Irishmen and reprobate foreign devils (especially Englishmen) had better live on the Blaskets where he can admire himself without disturbance."
"There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs."
"One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!"
"History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe."
"The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest."
