Spike Lee Quotes

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain top and pointed the way to the Promised Land. Yes we can!

Gay marriage will be universally accepted in time. But if I may be so bold as to say to gays and lesbians, don't wait for that time to arrive. Just as my father and his generation did not 'wait' for their civil rights, nor should you. The toothpaste ain't going back in the tube. The tide has turned.

The civil rights movement didn't end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.

While nothing is perfect or complete in the battle for civil rights, the efforts of Dr. King and those like him have in fact, changed the country and the world for the better in noticeable ways. His vision has made the world a more equal place, and if not equal, it has helped to ensure that minorities have a voice.

If you only make fights that you're going to win, there would be no women's vote in America, there would be no civil rights laws in the country.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

I feel like in 10 or 15 years' time our children are going to look back and say, 'What? You were around when gay people weren't allowed to get married?'

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.

The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

Time and changes in the condition and constitution of society may require occasional and corresponding modifications

If someone had told me in 1963 that in 50 years we would see a Black man in the white house, I would have said “You’re crazy! You are not living in the real world.”

It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature [us] will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do

I do not believe as Martin Luther King did, that the arc of history bends towards justice. I see the arc of history bending towards chaos or the unknown.

Abolition didn't just happen - people made it happen. Women's suffrage didn't just happen - people made it happen. Civil Rights legislation didn't just happen - people made it happen. And marriage equality didn't just happen, either - people made it happen.

We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

The civil rights fight was a very important fight.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.

I believe that the racial injustice which existed such a short time ago probably would have persisted longer if the color barrier had not been broken in baseball.