What we are working for is an educational program that has become a resource and rallying point for scores of brave southerners who are leading the fight for justice and better race relations in these crucial days
Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.
We're just at a point in regard to race relations, we're at a tipping point in America. It's a crucial time. It's sad, honestly, I think it's a place that deep down no one wants to be in. But it's something that needs to be addressed, it's something that needs to be fixed, and hopefully we can figure it out and take steps toward doing that.
Living here in North America - I have been Americanized. When I go back home now, there are things that I have far less tolerance for in South Africa. We've come such a long way in terms of race relations and the economy as well as people's willingness to move on. There are still a lot of things that are frustrating about being in South Africa.
You also had in Detroit that summer, an early variation of Ferguson. A black prostitute was shot in the back by police. And all of the efforts that a very progressive police chief and mayor of that period had put into trying to restore race relations started to fall apart again, and you could see that unraveling for several years until the riots or rebellion of 1967.
One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave.
You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.
The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
The share of Americans who say race relations are bad in this country is the highest it's been in decades, much of it amplified by shootings of African-Americans by police, as we've seen recently in Charlotte and Tulsa.
I have compromised down the line. I've disliked it intensely in the old days when you were trying to talk race relations and they would not allow you to talk about the legitimacies of race relations. In the old days, you didn't talk about black, you talked about Eskimo or American Indian, and the American Indian was assumed not to be a problem area.
When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in. Through a comedic voice you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale.
Historically - when you look at how America has evolved, typically we make progress on race relations in fits and starts. We make some progress, and then there's maybe some slippage.
If you are going to abolish slavery, that opens up all these other questions: what system of labor is going to replace slave labor? What system of race relations is going to replace the race relations of slavery? Who is going to have power in the post-war South? The Emancipation Proclamation doesn't answer that question, but it throws [it] open.
I think various places in this country are ready to explode. I think [race relations] are very tense. I think that [Barack] Obama has divided the country as far as race relations are concerned, and I think that you have certain sections, and you have lots of different locations within this country that potentially are powder kegs.
[Race relations in 2015 are] almost as bad as they have ever been in the history of the country.
Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago no matter what some folks say. You can see it not just in statistics, you see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we're not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do.
People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
I think that, ultimately, the only thing that affects race relations is fair treatment.
President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying figure. He could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together. And he hasn't done that, he's made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together.
Though President Obama was at his smooth and polished best the other night, two aspects of his worldview came into sharper relief - his reflexive hostility toward and misunderstanding of business and his reliable resort to left-wing fables about race relations.
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.
I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.
In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact.
School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers.
It's not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: