Quotes from Jesse Jackson

I'm too mature to be angry.

People always grow and mature.

When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

At least the politicians are accountable to the voters.

I take my role seriously as a pastor.

Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs.

If you think black people have a motivation problem, open up a Wal-Mart and advertise a thousand jobs. Watch 5,000 people show up.

When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.

We reveal our joys and successes, we conceal our pain.

Watch the walls come down, whether it's in the South or on Wall Street. When the walls come down, what do we find? More markets, more talent, more capital and growth. Which means that the race and sex discrimination stunt economic growth. It's not good for capitalism. It's not good for America's growth. And it's not morally right.

There have been more people disenfranchised in Washington than there have been in Kuwait.

I know how to run a nationally paced campaign.

You can't vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.

Black men of integrity cannot make a deal with a politician and leave out the poor of the nation, all God's children.

A man who cannot be enticed by money or intimidated by the threat of jail or death has two of the strongest weapons that anyone has to offer.

You can't plant a seed and pick the fruit the next morning.

My very first recollection of life on earth was waking up in bed with my mother, and she was showing me a picture of my father, Charles Jackson, with a group of soldiers.

The solution [to a crisis pregnancy] is not to kill the innocent baby but to deal with the mother's values and her attitudes toward life.

You may not be responsible for being down, but you must be responsible for getting up.

Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.

The only justification for ever looking down on somebody is to pick them up.

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.