Lyman Beecher Quotes

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

If you really want to see something scary, turn on the nightly news. To me, for people to say 'look at the films' is ludicrous. The world we live in needs to change.

The world wasn't a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

In violent streets and broken homes, the cry of anguished souls is not for more laws but for more conscience and character.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

The signs and banners of protesters are the zoom lenses by which we can focus on the difficult issues of a society.

I’m angry with what’s happening to our country and angry with myself that I can’t do more.

Certain people cause so many problems, not only to the running of the town and the country, but to people themselves.

I run into a lot of ignorance and stupidity. It gets really frustrating, but you have to take yourself out of it and realize what's happening in the bigger picture.

Rural towns aren't always idyllic. It's easy to feel trapped and be aware of social hypocrisy.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

You have no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant negro population just emerged from slavery.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

Any initiative which patently served the interests of society was immediately viewed with suspicion and even with overt hostility. Why was our system so unresponsive to renewal and innovation?

Undoubtedly, to salve your conscience, you have now and then helped some miserable human being, but millions of human beings were murdered and nary a protest was heard.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

One of the things that free people do is engage in conspiracies of silence about problems that do not seem solvable.

If the wealth of the whole world is, as you say, "pre-eminently and beneficially the nation's wealth," how is it that thousands of able-bodied, willing, earnest men and women are suffering the pangs of hunger? We may boast of our wealth and civilization, but to the hungry man and woman and child our progress is a hollow mockery, our civilization a sham, and our "national wealth" a chimera.

The people are getting screwed In this country.

Perhaps our generation … will live to reflect … that our hard times were not in vain. They should make us more conscious of the conditions which we wish to eradicate.

For evil to take place, the acts of a few people are not sufficient; the great majority also has to remain indifferent.

Class warfare is being waged in America, and the wrong side is winning.

When I was confronted with just the bare facts of poverty and inequality in America, it always disturbed and confused me.