Clint Smith Quotes

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

I don't know how one would define an affirmative-action hire. I ultimately do not know what role race played in my hiring.

Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval of affirmative action.… We have to prove ourselves and we have to work hard doing it.

I think it's worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.

I don't think quotas are necessarily an evil. I think when we look at industry in general back to the '60s and the '50s, the way more diverse people like my dad and mom's generation were able to break into industry was because of affirmation action, because of quotas.

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.

You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.

If we are prepared to invest the necessary time and effort, affirmative action can contribute to Harvard's quality and not detract from it.

The system of creating opportunities for those who were by law excluded, you've got to do that. But you mustn't create a perception that the process is devoid of competitiveness... devoid of building a world class, sustainable black business community.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

I'm always excited when I make it on anyone's list - even if it's for affirmative action. My attitude is, 'Am I the token woman on this list? Because I'll take it.'

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.