J. C. Watts Quotes

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy.

Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.

All children should have equal opportunities.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

I feel passionately that the opportunities I have had should be available to everyone.

We are all about the equality through society and sport.

I think the minority students that we admit to Harvard are every bit as meritorious as the white students that we admit.

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.

Middle America believes in fair play, an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

Now, as a nation, we don't promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That's an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

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

You just want to be judged against everyone fairly.

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.

The promise of the American Dream requires that we are all provided an equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to our nation.

Our workforce and our entire economy are strongest when we embrace diversity to its fullest, and that means opening doors of opportunity to everyone and recognizing that the American Dream excludes no one.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is the policy of the state [of New York] that the American ideal of equality of opportunity requires that students ... be admitted to educational institutions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, or national origin.

We are a nation without classes or special privileges.

Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.