Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

You can only watch injustice go on for so long until you're compelled to say something. To speak out against it.

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.

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.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

This is always a pain because it's injustice too and so my response to it, I tell you what I am more surprised or horrified at Jews who forget to be humanists than I am at anybody else.

Dr. King said, 'We are all tied together in a garment of mutual destiny.' Which says to me no matter how well I may be doing in Hollywood, if a young brother or sister in Louisiana, the South Bronx, the South Side of Chicago, South Central Los Angeles - is not doing well, then I'm not doing very well.

I think it is incumbent on all human beings to oppose injustice in every form.

American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

What will foreign nations say to our shame, if we allow them to live together by hundreds, like brutes, in utter licentiousness, and do not provide herein as for our own countrymen?

In the South they don't mind how close I get, so long as I don't get too big. In the North they don't mind how big I get, so long as I don't get too close.

Essentially, Eisenhower passed on to his successors the problem of guaranteeing constitutional rights to Negro citizens.

Abolish lynching

This is a hard job to do …. We represent the underdog, and that makes the top dogs angry.

You have a task; go bravely home and take it up like men …. Do your duty also as citizens of the United States, do your duty as men who feel a responsibility upon you, and remember, friends, that it is better to die an uncrowned free man than a crowned slave. You and I must protest against this injustice to the American people that we are suffering

It is evident that slavery wrested its prey from the eaters of human flesh, but it has only progressed in regard to cannibalism; whenever it finds itself in the presence of Christianism, and, above all, of human reason, it must abdicate under penalty of becoming monstrous.--The persistency of the Southern States in slavery is the greatest moral deformity of the nineteenth century

Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York. He says well, they are coming along, and that, after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart. My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have been, frankly, inbred.

The Negro is not permitted to testify because he might tell of the enormities practiced upon him.

Mrs. Roosevelt has gone so far in aiding the campaign for complete social equality that she has, in effect, endorsed intermarriage. She thinks marriage between whites and Negroes is an individual matter since it is a very personal problem. The unanimous condemnation of the Southland came down upon her.

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil.

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms -- to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.

All who abhor the immortality of discrimination and social injustice toward their fellow men must share the impatience of the nation’s Negro Americans and stand shoulder to shoulder with them in full active and affirmative support of their struggle to make a present reality out of the 100 year old Emancipation Proclamation.

It is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

No man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime… It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.