Hill Harper Quotes

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

I wanted to be as genuine as possible because all those people like Jimmie Lee Jackson - me, Mike Brown, all these people - we're all the same; we're not much different.

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

We talk of a rainbow nation - in a country that remains dichotomized between black and white. We must acknowledge that the rainbow, in fact, is still a dream.

There is no 'us' and 'them'; it's an illusion. We are all human beings, and we all have a responsibility to support one another and to discover ways of wresting the power from the very, very few people who control all the cash and all the property.

We have a duty to face racism and to fight it.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members

Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

We all have to do our part, because we are all in this together and it matters.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.

There's not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

We are the world.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King - and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Black men of integrity cannot make a deal with a politician and leave out the poor of the nation, all God's children.

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.