Charles Sumner Quotes

In the 1960’s I was opposed to a system of preferences known as white supremacy. I am still against preferences.

Racial discrimination is wrong and racial preference is just as wrong.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities…. This nation … will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Put simply, we must always remember that separate but equal is not equal.

I rejoice that I have lived to see this day, when the colored people of this favored land, by law, have equal privileges with the most favored. And I have faith to believe that ere long equal justice will be granted to the poor Indians and the Chinese.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right.

Equality and separation cannot exist in the same space.

We were taught in school, and I was taught at home and in church, that blacks and whites were equal and we should not discriminate based on skin color, even if my school was almost entirely white.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

I believe discrimination still exists in society and we must fight it in every form.

There's no such thing as second class citizenship. That's like telling me you can be a little bit pregnant.

Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.

We have a history of gender and racial bias on our court that continues to undermine the system. Excluding individuals based on race is antagonistic to the pursuit of justice.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

I do know that God created us equal and we're not living up to it.

As we celebrate the considerable progress we've made toward full equality in our military, we cannot forget about those who continue to suffer because of the discriminatory policies of our past.

In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.

The days of humiliation, of second-class citizens and of inequality are over and gone forever.

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

The idea of equal rights was in the air.

All men are created equal, it is only men themselves who place themselves above equality.

Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race ... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom.