Toni Morrison Quotes

About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population, and it is an undue tax on even the proverbial patience of my countrymen.

Myself, I happen to be married to an African-American woman, and we're together 17 years. We took a few trips to the South 15 years ago, and we were sobered by some of the reactions people had - how subtle or not-so-subtle their reactions were.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

What began as a political protest turned into a class war and a racial pogrom.

What is it in our society that encourages us to periodically to turn on each other? What is it in our society that leads us to the cycle of violence.

I have no idea how one stops one group, one race, from hating another. The hatred between human groups has never been cured, except by time.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

We’ve gone down the road of multiculturalism, which ostensibly says that all minorities have equal status to the majority, The result has been that we have handed minorities a stick with which to beat the majority.

Direct your attention to the introduction of white immigrants on account of the large increase of negroes who are beginning to exhibit a malicious disposition.

That means nigger citizenship!!!

Once you go outside of Atlanta, there are still a lot of Klan rallies and whatnot. There are a lot of conflicting elements that are trying to solve itself in that city.

The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants.

Discomfort levels in our societies are rising, or so it would seem. In theory, we invoke diversity and tolerance. But in real life, we raise our hackles and withdraw into ourselves.

A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

The saddest part of the human race is we're obsessed with this idea of 'us and them,' which is really a no-win situation, whether it's racial, cultural, religious or political.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

An American, a Negro... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

I don't hate redheads! The millionaire men - wealthy men - never pick them. Every time I offer them they say no. I could say the most gorgeous redhead in the world and they'll say no, they don't want it. Now if you ask an Irish guy in Ireland, he says 'yes,' because that's indigenous to that country.

After Civil Rights, it was very awkward for whites and blacks. We didn't know how to talk to each other.

Stone Mountain, Georgia, still had Ku Klux Klan marches, and I had a wild and courageous mother who'd put us in the car to watch them. She wanted us to know those things existed.

Palestinians have had to live for a long time with the fact that Israelis had power over them in their everyday lives.

Many Jews are not Zionists and many non-Jews are. Zionism is a political movement, not a race. To say Zionism is the Jewish people is like saying the Democratic Party is the American people. Jewish people who oppose Zionism, however, have been given a very hard time.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.