Bernard Lewis Quotes

Even though the founders were aggressive in pursuing liberty, their quest for equality failed to include all.

I know how difficult it is to be not just a woman, but a black woman, and I know how much we get attacked and our voices aren't heard. I experience it every single day.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Treating women like a burden to the men is one of the reasons for poverty.

… as long as men, even socialist men, even the best men in the world, make laws these will be to their advantage and to our disadvantage.

One of the major differences between gender discrimination and Racial or Religious Discrimination is that the with the latter the perpetrators fundamentally recognized that it was based on power offered moral challenges. However, men—the perpetrators of discrimination against women have mostly not even considered the moral aspect of it and perceived it as natural.

For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.

We live in a world that does not recognize virtually anyone outside of the white male or the beautiful white woman who has to be an object of desire and affection.

Power, privilege, and violence are not, and never were, strictly Southern issues in America.

My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, family support, and so many other factors shield me from some of the worst possible consequences - often fatal ones - that result from the toxic combination of misogyny, racism, and anti-trans sentiment.

Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it's just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

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

It is always open season on Christian and on white folks because they are the group you can kick and you can get away with it. It is politically correct.

When a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive.

It's incredibly hard out there for women of color.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.