Chris Rock Quotes

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

You supposed to be able to do anything in this world. That's what Martin Luther King told me.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

When I started my pathway, black players were often considered to be good wingers, good players, but not captain or management material. It has changed since then, which is pleasing, but we still have so far to go.

My grandmother probably never thought she would see a day where, you know, a young black woman would be seen as a leader, which is incredible.

I was born in the 1960s. I came up in the 1970s. I know how race relations were. The thing is, I want to advance the ball and never return to those days again. I want to keep the topic going. I'm going to discuss it. And we're going to make America better. It's my job as a citizen, and I demand it.

There's a time when it was an event for a black person to be on television. Where black households would gather around, 'Oh, you know, Sammy Davis is going to be on 'All in the Family' tonight! Let's go check it out!' It was a big, big thing.

Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset.

We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when yellow will be mellow... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.

I enjoy that the most powerful person in Hollywood is indeed a Black woman in Oprah Winfrey. I'm hoping to just transcend beyond that.

I think that having a black president in this country has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

Freedom is incomplete without social justice.

God is liberal of color; so should man be.

We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as free humans in this society.

Let the shameful walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down.

Integration begins the day after the minds of the people are desegregated.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago no matter what some folks say. You can see it not just in statistics, you see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we're not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do.

Throughout our history each and every generation has expanded upon the freedoms won by their parents and grandparents. Each and every generation has removed some of the barriers to full participation in the American dream. And the next great barrier standing before our generation is the prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples

I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you.