Jesse Jackson Quotes

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act.

I think if people value democracy, they had damn well better get out and exercise their right to vote while their vote still means something.

Getting people to vote is the only way to break this tragic coalition in Congress.

Voting rights are constitutional rights.

I've got friends who didn't vote. I want to smack them upside the head.

Susan B. Anthony must be turning in her grave if she knew that millions of women who have the right to vote are not exercising it. Why? Because they haven't got the interest or the time, or they have just given up hope.

According to the U.S. Census, the most common reason people give for not voting is that they were too busy or had conflicting work or school schedules.

Having personally watched the Voting Rights Act being signed into law that August day, I can't begin to imagine how we could have all been so wrong in believing that more Americans would vote once they were all truly free to do so.

We have a legacy to uphold: the people who died so that we could have the right to vote; the people who sacrificed so that we would one day realize the dream of a black president.

I can't vote again ever, so political party is not a relevant thing for me.

We must continually work to obtain and preserve the right to vote and future votes of babies in the womb, their parents, the sick, the elderly, the poor, all Americans.

They talked about how it was our rights as human beings to register and vote. I never knew we could vote before. Nobody ever told us.

I'm baffled by the people who say, 'I'm just not going to vote.'

A lot of times, elections are lost, and the hope of the public is lost because they don't turn out.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

I always vote. If I have the right, I'm going to vote.

Get out and vote. If you can't vote, then register other people to vote. Get people to the polls; make sure that people who need to vote can vote.

Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.

Nobody black or white who really believes in democracy can stand aside now; everybody's got to stand up and be counted.

Citizenship means standing up for everyone's right to vote.***

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

If you don't vote, you don't count.

All the blood is drained out of democracy - it dies - when only half the population votes.