Bill Maher Quotes

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.

I think that the problem of the American negro goes beyond the principle of any organization whether it's a religious, political, or otherwise.

The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

I'M HOPELESS, because I've lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I'm not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

Jesus was a poor, black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people. The Romans were Italian - which means they were Europeans, which means they were white - and the Romans ran everything in Jesus' country.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Black people have been working hard for decades.

Labor in white skin cannot be free so long as labor in a black skin is branded.

It is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

Slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground.

If you read the 13th Amendment, it doesn't talk about narratives of racial difference. It doesn't talk about ideologies of white supremacy. It only talks about involuntary servitude and forced labor.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

For centuries in this country, black people were seen as three-fifths of a person. So when you hear the national anthem or you see an American flag as an African American person who has experienced the effects of that dehumanizing existence, it's not going to mean the same.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.

Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.

The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

I think that we need to have an honest conversation in this country. This idea that somehow we're beyond sexism, beyond racism is just wrong. And this is where having an honest conversation with white men about their issues and their concerns, and having honest conversations about the experiences that African-Americans are still having, despite who's the president of the United States, in the criminal justice system that we see in sentencing, we see in policing and a lot of these issues.