Quotes About Prejudice

We're disinclined to believe that someone who's an attentive student or a congenial athlete could also be a serial rapist.

guys who may have 'made mistakes' nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.

Arguing for black enfranchisement in 1867, Frederick Douglass said: "If black men have no rights in the eyes of white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. The result is a war of races, and the annihilation of all proper human relations.

It is," TR said, "a base outrage to oppose a man because of his religion or birthplace, and all good citizens will hold any such effort in abhorrence.

The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.

There was more. "I would build a wall of steel," Walker said, "a wall as high as Heaven, against the admission of a single one of those Southern Europeans who never thought the thoughts or spoke the language of a democracy in their lives.

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.

Black people, Taney went on, "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

No arguments you may use, no facts you may present, no logic you may array will in the slightest affect these people," the Kansas editor William Allen White, who opposed the Klan in an unsuccessful race for governor, wrote. "They have no capacity for receiving arguments, no minds for retaining or sifting facts and no mental processes that will hold logic. If they had any of these they would not be Kluxers.

In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New York law requiring the Klan to file membership lists with state authorities on the grounds that, as the appellate court in the case wrote, "It is a matter of common knowledge that the association or organization"—the Klan—"exercises activities tending to the prejudice and intimidation of sundry classes of our citizens.

We know instinctively," Jane Addams wrote, "that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.

The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin

Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I

the very fact that I felt a moment's qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself and made me hasten to send the invitation.

Thomas E. Dewey—once said: "You can't divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can't encourage people's prejudices. You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal said, "President Roosevelt has committed a blunder that is worse than a crime, and no atonement or future act of his can remove the self-imprinted stigma." Alabama's Geneva Reaper was especially harsh. "Poor Roosevelt!" the paper wrote. "He might now just as well sleep with Booker Washington, for the scent of that coon will follow him to the grave as far as the South is concerned.

Clive's point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners—young, black—have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time—bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.

A tiny little baby!' says Tam. 'People look at me like I'm an animal. People who don't know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: There's a pedophile! Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I'll tell you, it outweighed anything I'd ever done.' 'What had she done?' I ask. 'Shoplifting,' says Tam. There is silence.

the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was "the desire to run away from slavery" and the cure was to "whip the devil out of them

we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. —DAVID ROSENHAN

A wronged person is still a wronged person even if they're an unfashionable wronged person.

I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

So as well as hating you, they also hate them – whoever they are – these faceless people who are sitting in judgement over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can't say out loud.