Susan Estrich Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.

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.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.

Since governmental quotas expand bureaucratic power, provoke a backlash and are unfair to individuals, we need to find a better way to increase minority opportunities.

I don't want affirmative action - too much affirmative, not enough action.

I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

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.

I still favor alternatives to governmental race-based preferences.

I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.

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

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 the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

Racial preferences are dead. All that is required now is to give them a decent and honorable burial.

We suspect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.

I am the perfect affirmative action baby.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.