Selected race quotes

1. This pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess. The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of Christianity-for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race. (13th February 1945)

2. I didn't say that the Jews are inferior. I didn't even maintain they are a race. I merely saw that the mixture of different cultures didn't work.

3. You know why Guns n' Roses aren't a good band? Because no black people listen to them.

4. The body expresses our very being. The striving for beauty is inborn among the Aryan.

5. I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

6. It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

7. For me, soldiers are all equal. Those black people wore your same uniform, fought on your side, and so you will be in the same jail.

8. The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.

9. There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not.

10. The colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

11. See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based... I want to cut his nuts off. Barack, he's talking down to black people.

12. People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.

13. Joe Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black... But neither of us could do national advertising because the South wouldn't buy it. That was the social stigma we lived under.

14. The Jews are a race and not a religion. My goal was not to persecute the Jews but to enlighten Gentiles to put them on guard.

15. Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.

16. The brave men who died in Vietnam, more than 100% of which were black, were the ultimate sacrifice.

17. As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

18. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

19. Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

20. I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

21. The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

22. As late as the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Monthly, then a still respected magazine for literates and edited by White men, published a long article by Albert Jay Nock, in which he proved that the Jews are an Oriental race that is incompatible with ours. He was not punished and the magazine was not destroyed, strange and almost incredible as that seems today.

23. Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.

24. But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

25. The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.

26. Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?

27. While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.

28. I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.

29. It's great to be black in Hollywood. When a black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he's black.

30. My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereaved of light.

31. To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

32. I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

33. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

34. 'What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?'

35. The African is my brother - but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

36. Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check : is wealthy. 'Ah, here you go, Shaq. Go buy yourself a bouncing car. Bling, bling!'

37. So if you're black or brown, you can make money in America, you can get rich in America : but whatever you decide to do, it better be positive, 'cause if one person is harmed, you will be destroyed. You see Oprah, she just be giving away money. She's doing that to keep the Feds off her back.

38. 'Terrorists don't take black hostages. Thats the truth. I have yet to see one of us on the news reading a hostage letter. Like, 'Uh...they is treatin us good. Uh we are chillin and shit. I'd like to give a shout out to Ray-Ray an Big Steve and uh, send some Newports!' '

39. The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the 'legitimate' votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the 'real' Americans the Democrats must pursue.

40. Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word 'race' has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

41. I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.

42. I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

43. Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

44. But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

45. If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

46. Race does not need to be the natural dividing line on important national issues because many indigenous people and organisations have opposed the Bill. We can learn from this debate that race is an artificial barrier in our community, and that sometimes, it is little more than a safe harbour for politicians who should know better.

47. It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man - not a color.

48. Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.

49. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

50. If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

51. The attempt to place the white population under the domination of persons of color in the South has impaired, if not destroyed, the kindly relations that had previously existed between them: and mutual distrust has engendered a feeling of animosity which leading in some instances to collision and bloodshed, has prevented that cooperation between the two races so essential to the success of industrial enterprise in the Southern States.

52. 'My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity.'

53. Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

54. The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.

55. I don't believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

56. The Elgin writer says that we shall 'jeopardize the best interests of the Socialist Party' if we insist upon the political equality of the Negro. I say that the Socialist Party would be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings if, on account of race considerations, it sought to exclude any human being from political equality and economic freedom. Then, indeed, would it not only 'jeopardize' its best interests, but forfeit its very life, for it would soon be scorned and deserted as a thing unclean, leaving but a stench in the nostrils of honest men.

57. The African is here and to stay. How came he to our shores? Ask your grandfathers, Mr. Anonymous, and if they will tell the truth you will or should blush for the crimes.

58. As an artistic triumph in psychological corruption ... the Gospels, in fact, stand alone ... Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal 'holiness' unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art - all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race.

59. The homogenizing of European man ... requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a Master Race whose sole task is to rule, but a Race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength ... strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.

60. A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it.

61. My son don't have to say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud. He don't have to be called those crazy names.

62. Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank.

63. Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.

64. There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent huger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity.

65. 'Racist' is a confusing word, and it should be clarified. Men have no special rights simply because they belong to one race or another. Whey you say 'men,' you have already imbued them with al their rights.

66. In Cuba, there is no fear of a racial war. Men are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. Cubans are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. On the field of battle, dying for Cuba, the souls of whites and Negroes have risen together into the air.

67. Ostentatious men who are governed by self-interest will combine, whether white or black, and the generous and selfless will similarly unite. True men, black and white, will treat one another with loyalty and tenderness, out of a sense of merit and the pride of everyone who honors the land in which we were born, black and white alike. Negroes, who now use the word 'racist' in good faith, will stop using it when they realize it is the only apparently valid argument that weak men, who honestly believe that Negroes are inferior, use to deny them the full exercise of their rights as men. White and black racists would be equally guilty of racism.

68. I venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, which to my mind, without making invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman; and those qualifications are that in the first place I believe in the British Empire, and in the second place I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen.

69. I hate music where white people are trying to sound black. The white music I like is white.

70. Of Etienne Dupach, the editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune: 'It must remembered that Dupach is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.' (Ziegler, King Edward VIII, 448)

71. The way they're treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.

72. Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored - it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.

73. The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

74. 'Race is a fact of life and is not a problem unless people make it out to be so.' (2003)

75. 'Government seems unaware that the more race-based measures it tries to put in place the faster that time bomb burns to detonation point.'

76. 'Touted as a legislation that will promote unity, it has done exactly the opposite. It has divided this country, apparently and sadly along racial lines.' (on the government's controversial Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, which Ganilau opposes).

77. 'One (path) is confrontation and the politics of exclusion. The other is the path of cooperation and trust. We either embrace the concept of multiracialism or we go down the path of racial vilification and alienation.'

78. (on the Indian presence in his country): 'Let us not ignore the fact that there is another community settled here in our midst. I refer to the Indians. They have increased more rapidly than we. They have become producers on our soil. They are continuously striving to better themselves. Although they are a different race, yet we are each a unit in the British Empire. They have shouldered many burdens that have helped Fiji onward. We have derived much money from them by way of rents. A large proportion of our prosperity is derived from their labour.'

79. Why did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white? Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?

80. White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world.