Quotes from Juan Williams

Even after they fired me, called me a bigot and publicly advised me to only share my thoughts with a psychiatrist, I did not call for defunding NPR. I am a journalist, and NPR is an important platform for journalism.

If you're a black kid, you're going to have hell in your life.

It's almost a shock to me to go into places, and there's smoking these days. Boy, my life has changed, because everybody used to smoke.

In 2008, when the real estate market blew up, it principally hurt older people who saw the value of their houses go down, along with their pension plans.

When I'm on TV, I'm often talking to a conservative host. I may have another conservative arguing with me. You've got very limited time, and you're using 'sound-bite' type language.

Beyond budget fights, the Obama second-term agenda was supposed to be about passing comprehensive immigration reform.

In 2007 the 'dagger' of an idea that killed President Bush's effort at reforming the immigration system was lax border security.

When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims.

The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers.

As President Obama is inaugurated for a second time, the biggest political surprise is that gun control is now key to his political legacy.

I've always thought the Right-wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant,and now I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, it's representing the Left.

Republicans believed that their job was not governing but blocking any idea coming from President Obama and the Democrats, and wiping out Democrats in the 2012 election.

The Republicans want to turn Medicare into a voucher plan that will end guaranteed coverage of medical bills for the elderly.

The Tea Party is a fitting representation of our era of no-debate, politically correct politics, where each political side has its own media, and opposing views are almost never given a fair hearing. Conservatives listen only to conservatives, and liberals listen only to liberals. People are spared the inconvenience of facts that don't fit their beliefs and the unpleasantness of seriously considering a point of view other than their own.

In 1940 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 19 percent. Today it is close to 70 percent.

Closer to the idea of reparations for slavery, the Florida legislature has paid $150,000 to eight black people, the only living survivors of white racist attacks in 1923 that left twenty-six black people dead in the small black community of Rosewood. The legislature also provided $500,000 to compensate African American families who lost property during the attacks on black homes, churches, and businesses.

It does away with a lot of complaints that 'We Were Also Done Wrong,' from the Irish or other minorities, precisely because it recognizes the fundamental difference. African Americans were kept down by the force of law, not custom, and then every effort to lift the burden of the law was met with denial of due process.

the Democratic Party, and decades of Democratic control of Congress, the schools have continued to fail minority children? Big-city schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class in the last thirty years. Their academic performance has declined. In addition, the black middle class has joined whites in moving out to the suburbs to get their children away from those schools.

what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.

To finance his failing campaign, he reportedly took about $200,000 from a Republican political strategist known for playing dirty politics, Roger Stone.

put back in their place.

Hooray," Cosby said, spitting it out bitterly. "Anybody see any sense in this? Systemic racism, they [black leaders] call it." Then Cosby pointed out the obvious issue—but one that the black civil rights leadership somehow missed or for some reason underplayed. Black leaders, he declared, should tell poor black people to stop smoking crack.

the strong focus on self-determination has faded, at the moment when its impact could have been the most powerful. In its place is a tired rant by civil rights leaders about the power of white people—what white people have done wrong, what white people didn't do, and what white people should do. This rant puts black people in the role of hapless victims waiting for only one thing—white guilt to bail them out.