Racism quotes
849 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside racism — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them."
"A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib."
"I would hope that racism is something that just does not work in this day and age, but I know otherwise."
"If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive."
"I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete."
"Whether that's racism, whether it's bigotry, whether it's gender inequality - whatever it is, it's all stemming from "me against you." And, like, how do you stop it? I just want to do my little part in helping try to stop it."
"I'M FEARFUL because in the back of my mind I know that although I'm a law abiding citizen I could still be looked upon as a "threat" to those who don't know me. So I will continue to have to go the extra mile to earn the benefit of the doubt."
"I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty."
"I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color."
"The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own Inferiority."
"I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind."
"All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism."
"They tell us we are all citizens, that we were born in this country. Well, a cat can have kittens in the oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits!"
"Everybody's scared for their ass. There aren't too many people ready to die for racism. They'll kill for racism but they won't die for racism."
"The racism is so profound and the recognition - the kind of deep recognition that you have to humiliate. It's not about to killing or torture. It's to humiliate. So the oppressed feel degraded. And both the oppressed understand and the oppressors understand. It's constant."
"I don't like to just talk of Africa, and south of the Sahara in general. No, I'll talk about the Third World in general. I'll like to say this - we in the United States would never believe that another form of goverment - I don't care even if it's against the racism, etc. - it is hard to get the masses of people to believe or accept that a socialist government will relieve them of most of the problems."
"The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person."
"The way we have to measure progress is not, "Is there ever going to be an incident of racism in the country?" It's, "How does the majority of our country respond?""
"The notion that black folks have nothing to learn from scholarship that may reflect racial or racist biases is dangerous. It promotes closed-mindedness and a narrow understanding of knowledge to hold that "race" is such an overwhelming concept that it negates the validity of any insights contained in a work that may have some racist or sexist aspects."
"As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing."
