Chris Rock Quotes

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

I had great admiration for the election of President Obama. I believe that the U.S. at that moment showed tremendous capacity to show that it is a great nation, and it surprised the world. It may be very difficult to be able to elect a black president in the U.S. - as it was very difficult to elect a woman president in Brazil.

At least they [people] showed the world we could elect a black president.

Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President.

In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought we'd come to the point where were talking about the re-election of a black president.

I think that seeing as much support as somebody like Obama as a black candidate running for president in a country that historically has had issues with the African-American people, and them having issues vice-versa, is a miraculous thing.

Let me tell you the truth: I'm 45 years old. I never thought that I would live to see a black president.

Electing a black president was probably the only coup America could pull off.

We do have a black president, and that means a lot. People ask, 'What has he done?' What he's done is change the color up, which you see on the screen. When the head of the free world is black, there's got to be some sort of spin-off from it.

If someone had told me in 1963 that in 50 years we would see a Black man in the white house, I would have said “You’re crazy! You are not living in the real world.”

Irving Wallace wrote a bestselling novel, The Man, in the 1960s about a black man becoming president of the United States. We thought that such a possibility was thousands of years in the future. Some people may still have some difficulty with the idea, but that's a major cultural meme shift.

Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he's treated. We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country.

To see an African-American elected president means that this country is really finally coming full circle from the birth defect of slavery.

Something about the fact that an African American had, given the long sad history of our country, now become President - that was exhilarating.

'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.

I think it is so great right now that we are in an age where there's an African American president in office. I think it is important for our generation to really witness that.

The first black president will be a politician who is black.

The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

There is no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can achieve the position ... of President of the United States.

What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

Africans took a lot of pride in the election of Obama, because it proved wrong those who believe in racist assumptions, that a black man could not live up to a white man.

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

You look at how Barack Obama has had to conduct himself as president. It reminds me of Jackie Robinson, how he had to be very careful to reassure people that this was all right.

I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

We are not race blind. Of course we still have racial tensions in this country. But the United States of America has made enormous progress in race relations, and it is still the best place on Earth to be a minority.