Barack Obama Quotes

I want to make things equal.

I believe in the power of media. I really do. It's my soapbox. And I do have an agenda, because I'm enraged by the limitations forced on people - by poverty, oppression, hatred, fear - and I'm saddened by the kind of loss we all experienced due to the contributions that people cannot make because of their circumstances.

I do know that God created us equal and we're not living up to it.

Desegregation is a joke.

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

Does being practical mean we prop up a legal system that's unfair, that bears its weight down on black men and black women, and by extension if you are Hispanic or indigenous or poor? Does being practical mean you don't say to the American people you deserve better than you're getting? That's not the practical we want.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

Black lives matter' doesn't mean that all lives do not matter, rather it is a cry for equal treatment in the greater circle of justice for all Americans.

When our Founding Fathers wrote the historic words 'all men are created equal,' they probably didn't have people like me in mind.

Civil rights and women's rights and gay rights all take time in this country.

We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters.

Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it.

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.

Whenever in history, equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

We were taught in school, and I was taught at home and in church, that blacks and whites were equal and we should not discriminate based on skin color, even if my school was almost entirely white.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.