Dick Gregory Quotes

If the spirit of equality means anything, it means like opportunity, and if we once lose like opportunity, we lose the only chance we have toward equality throughout the nation.

Rights that were not open to all alike would be no rights.

In the long run it is more important to us as a nation to show the world that we believe in equality of opportunity, that we realize that any kind of segregation is discrimination whether it comes about because of race, color, or creed, and that we are determined to show the world that we believe in the things we preach.

We [Chicago] are known as the city that works. You gotta make sure it works for everybody and not just a few.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

That's what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it's fair, because people would be the best if they weren't discriminated against.

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.

Equality implies individuality.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

... equal responsibilities are less popular than equal rights.

Without equality there can be no democracy.

In our insistence upon equality of opportunity has our system advanced beyond all the world.

Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

Secure to all … citizens a perfect equality of rights

Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None.

The advantages and privileges which have hitherto enjoyed by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many.

Government should not deny to any of its citizens that which it gives to other citizens.

Our aim is a totally new and just constitutional dispension in which every inhabitant will enjoy equal rights, treatment and opportunity in every sphere of endeavour—constitutional, social and economic.

We seek not just freedom, but opportunity … not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

Equal and exact justice to every class of our citizens without distinction of color, sex or nationality.

[Speaking of civil rights;] We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as plain as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.

Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.

I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

If affirmative action is quotas, then I am not for it. If it means equal opportunity, then I say support that. But to ask for special treatment because of race, that bothers me...