William Julius Wilson Quotes

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

You can tell this by the program the federal government had to train 2,400 tractor drivers. They would have trained Negro and white together, but this man, Congressman Jamie Whitten, voted against it and everything that was decent. So, we've got to have somebody in Washington who is concerned about the people of Mississippi.

I think it is inevitable that leftist forces in the US would be divided, if not balkanized, to some extent. Among the full range of people who are committed to social and economic equality and ecological justice - i.e. to some variant of a leftist vision of a decent society - it will always be the case that some will be more focused on egalitarian economic issues, others around the environment and climate change, others on US imperialism, militarism and foreign policy, others on race and gender equality, and still others on sexual identity.

And a lot of Barack Obama's support people are angry, don't like this country, from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright on down. They think this country was founded in an unjust and immoral way and it has been unjust and immoral since it was founded. And it's about time it changed, it's about time the little guy got his share because the little guy is only little because everything's been stolen from him by the big guys.

There are many white people in this country who realize that the system itself - as it is constructed - is not so constructed that it can produce freedom and equality for the negro, and the system has to be changed.

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

I think there are some things that may even be distorted in the practice, such as some affirmative action programs becoming quota systems. And I'm old enough to remember when quotas existed in the United States for the purpose of discrimination, and I don't want to see that happen again.

What I think is really great about this movie [42], that young people who weren't there will have a chance to have the visceral experience of what Jackie Robinson went through.

I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.

It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.

People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.

I also think it's crucial to convey that the [Black] Movement largely succeeded because of the unwavering dedication of young people willing to risk their comfort, their safety, their lives.

I certainly embrace all the movement that's going on these days about equality for women and equal rights. In general, I would apply that to all nationalities and all races. I think we do need more awareness, generosity, and compassion than we have right now. But in terms of feminism, I embrace it wholeheartedly. Not in a kind of militant way, but I've always known that it matters.

My personal credo as a libertarian conservative: I think all attempts to reform your fellow-citizens or tell them how to live their lives are arrogant and tyrannical. THAT'S why I oppose Leftism. I want people to be free to manage their own lives. Reform is just authoritarianism. People are not playthings for anybody's theories or obsessions.

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough.

Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.

When you start to meet with ordinary people you understand that a Russian person, really any person from Russia, a Tatar, a Mordvin, a Chechen, a Dagestani, they are very open people, even a little naive. But there's one defining trait that probably all peoples have, although it comes out especially strongly in us. That's a drive toward fairness. It's one of the dominating, I think, traits in the mentality of a person from Russia, a Russian person.

Dorothy Day said - and I'm sure that Kathy Kelly would say the same thing - 'I'm working toward a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.' Now, think about that: a world in which it will be easier for people to behave decently.

I think that not criticizing my successor is a statement unto itself, in terms of trying to create an environment where people are able to have a meaningful discussion or debate without trash talk.

I think the Arab awakening has changed everything and I think a lot will depend on what people there ask of us, may be nothing, it may be a lot. I think that really depends how they find their voice and what they see as their real interest, and hopefully that would be for more schools and not more tanks.

This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice.

I can't tell you, I couldn't put a number on it, but it's big, the number of white voters in America that voted for Obama thinking it was the end of racial strife. Thinking by electing a black, that America would be stating, "We're not racist anymore." And I warned everybody, "It's not gonna happen, it's gonna get worse. It's going to get worse." And it was, it did become worst.