Nelson Mandela Quotes

I really think that discrimination and racism is a horrible thing. And I don't want any form of it in our government, in our public sphere.

Racism is a human problem and a crime that is absolutely so ghastly that a person who is fighting racism is well within his rights to fight against it by any means necessary until it is eliminated.

This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.

Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

I think racism is a terrible thing. I think we should all learn to hate each other on a individual basis.

I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination.

I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America.

We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.

In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.

Racism is a global problem and it is as damaging to Whites as it is to non-Whites. Everyone must fight against it.

I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan, and I shouldn't have to run from a black man.

I don't sign for white people.

As a nation we began by declaring that all me are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.

Ralph Bunche, who is an internationally recognized and respected diplomat, can't stay in a hotel in Georgia, which means that no matter what the accomplishment, the intellectual, the academic, or professional level of a negro is, collectively he stands condemned.

Protesting the color of a man's skin is not a worthy protest.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

Until we have a serious discussion, this problem [racism] will continue to occur.

Discrimination is discrimination no matter who the victim is, and it is always wrong. There are no special rights in America, despite the attempts by many to divide blacks and the gay community with the argument that the latter are seeking some imaginary special rights at the expense of blacks.

Now, personally, I am baffled by the concept of racial prejudice. Why hate someone based on the color of their skin when, if you take the time to get to know them as a human being, you can find so many other things to hate them for?

Racial profiling has to stop.

Race has no place in American life or law.

No American should ever live under the cloud of suspicion because of what they look like.