Minorities Quotes - Page 16

• A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected?

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Law, Alabama, Unjust

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.61, Beacon Press

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• We must remember that one of the most insidious ways of keeping women and minorities powerless is to let them only talk about harmless and inconsequential subjects.

  Mitsuye Yamada

  Way, Remember, Insidious

  Mitsuye Yamada, Merle Woo, Nellie Wong (2003). “Three Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism”, Red Letter Press

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• One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.

  Sigmund Freud

  Mean, Civilization, Imperfection

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• The Russian Federation has a growing Muslim minority, which is causing cultural and religious clashes. This is similar to mass immigration of Mexicans to America, and certain presidential candidates are tailoring their campaigns to get Mexican votes.

  David Duke

  Religious, Ku Klux Klan, America

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• As America is transformed from a 90 percent European American nation, as it was in the 1960s, to one where we will soon be a minority, should we not ask some pertinent questions. Is this racial diversity enriching, or will it be damaging to our social fabric?

  David Duke

  Pertinent Questions, Ku Klux Klan, America

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• Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland.

  David Duke

  Ku Klux Klan, White, Medicine

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• ... non-White Arab birthrates will make White Jewish people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and economic will of non-Whites Arabs. A social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral dirge of the America Israel we love.

  David Duke

  Israel, Ku Klux Klan, White

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• The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights-that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Country, Selfish, Rights

  Radio broadcast, March 2, 1930.

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• The [Elian] raid... was almost worth it, if only to watch Jesse Jackson...defending an armed pre-dawn raid by the US government on a minority household.

  Rich Galen

  Government, Dawn, Watches

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• Today's Democrats are little more than a collection of narrow interest groups-unions, tort lawyers, minorities headed by an ossified leadership. They are clever, tenacious and increasingly nasty in defending their perks, as establishments typically are.

  Robert L. Bartley

  Clever, Groups, Unions

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• ...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.

  George Orwell

  Giving, Politics, Negative

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

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• The ultimate goal of radical politics is gradually to displace the limit of social exclusions, empowering the excluded agents (sexual and ethnic minorities) by creating marginal spaces in which they can articulate and question their identity. Radical politics thus becomes an endless mocking parody and provocation, a gradual process of reidentification in which there are not final victories and ultimate demarcations

  Slavoj Žižek

  Creating, Space, Goal

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• Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.

  A.C. Grayling

  Rights, Liberty, Different

  A.C. Grayling (2007). “Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World”, Walker

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• The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The trail-blazers in human, scientific and religious freedom have always been in a minority.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Religious, World, Blazers

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• When I go in to see people - and I sell an occasional ad now - I never say, 'Help me because I am black' or 'Help me because I am a minority.' I always talk about what we can do for them.

  John H. Johnson

  People, Black, Helping

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• The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

  Walter Lippmann

  Art, Patriotic, Thinking

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.122, Harvard University Press

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• Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. Dissent (which come from the Latin, dis and sentire) means originally to feel apart from others. People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree and both may count themselves in the majority. But a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Cancer, Latin, Mean

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• Liberalism -- it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Determination, Generosity, Enemy

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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• In a democracy the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority...and that oppression of the majority will extend to far great number, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. Under a cruel prince they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings; but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are deprived of all external consolation: they seem deserted by mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.

  Edmund Burke

  Exercise, Numbers, People

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• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Fall, Reading, Writing

  "Less Than One: Selected Essays".

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• The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

  Ayn Rand

  Business, Class, Evil

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.74, Penguin

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• Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

  Julian Barnes

  Art, Reading, Skills

  "Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile" by Julian Barnes, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

  Octavio Paz

  Art, Uprising, People

  Octavio Paz (1973). “Alternating Current”, p.141, Arcade Publishing

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• I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.

  Derek Bok

  Thinking, White, Students

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• There is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling, thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavors are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.

  Albert Einstein

  Life, Beautiful, Running

  "Obituary for Emmy Noether". Letter to the Editor of The New York Times, www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk. May 5, 1935.

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