Carter G. Woodson Quotes

I am aware that in presenting myself as the advocate of the Indians and their rights, I shall stand very much alone.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don't want to be a colony in a nation.

Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.

The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the U.S. government, i.e. imperialism.

Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities and the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force, and we believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard.

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

If you want my opinion, I say that this is a state based on occupation, that has usurped the rights of others.

From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.

The soldiers never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged, but reported the misdeeds of the Indians.

The Georges were fair; they left all to the Government; but Anne was very bad and a tyrant. She tyrannised over the Irish. She died broken-hearted with all the bad things that were going on about her. For Queen Anne was very wicked; oh, very wicked, indeed!

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black.

I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation.

Flagrant injustice, cruelty and oppression…if left unchecked will so multiply that the whole of the native border tribes will be provoked into a battle of dangerous exasperation.

The idea of governing provinces and colonies by force is visionary and chimerical. The experiment has often been tried, and it has never succeeded. It ends infallibly in the ruin of one country or the other.

The record of Arab regimes is disgraceful and outrageous … worse than that of the occupier or the colonialist.

We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our Southern frontier; it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forest: and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries, Give! Give! ... Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?

The Act by which most of us hold our estates was an Act of violence—an Act subverting the first principles of the Common Law in England and Ireland …. Every acre of land is held by title derived under the Act of Settlement …. Consider how far it may be prudent to pursue the successive claims of dignified and unequivocal independence made for Ireland by the right honorable gentlemen.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people! Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you.

When the white man turns tyrant [colonialism], it is his own freedom he destroys.

A world divided into blocs, in which instead of solidarity, imperialism and exploitation hold sway, can only be a world structured in sin.

There seems to me no more hope for the Irish cause than for the corpse on the dissecting table

...They [Indians] should be made familiar with the lives of great and good men and women in American history, and be taught to feel a pride in all their great achievements. They should hear little or nothing of the 'wrongs of the Indians,' and of the injustice of the white race. If their unhappy race is alluded to, it should be to contrast it with the better future that is within their grasp.