Isabel Wilkerson Quotes

I ran away from home. I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States of America, because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one's very soul and body.

Violence ravaged my life. I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.

Jews, black people - any people who are hated or who have suffered, either as individuals or as a people - use humour. It is a survival skill.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.

No one has ever suffered from his people as I have.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.

Oppressed strangers in our land…

The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.

This people [the Puritans], who in England could not bear being chastised with rods, had no sooner got free from their fetters than they scourged their fellow refugees [Quakers] with scorpions; though the absurdity, as well as the injustice of such a proceeding in them might stare them in the face!

On Thanksgiving Night, 1942, when I was fifteen years old, white racists burned our house to the ground.

The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity.

As a child I learned what it meant to be persecuted. But, even then, at the worst of times, I knew there was good in the world.

As American Jews and descendants of immigrants, we never forget where our families came from or what members of our community experienced. Because we remember, we look out for those who are freeing persecution, oppression, and danger.

I probably wouldn't have made it this far if I were a refugee.

When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.

I used to sleep on floors and face racial abuse.

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian 'correctively' raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

In the basement of 33 Himmel Street, Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring to beat him down. They made him bleed. They let him suffer. Millions of them - until one last time, when he gathered himself to his feet.

The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim.

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

He hath disgrac'd me and hind'red me half a million; laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated my enemies. And what's his reason? I am a Jew.

Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice; by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant; by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.

It is absurd to quote religion or God or religious doctrines to render the people as lowest castes.