Mark Twain Quotes

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

Nobody wants to get over the legacy of slavery more than Black people do.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Like his white brother in the U. S. A., the American Negro is a proletarian by compulsion and not by choice. He regards the bourgeoisie with adulation rather than antagonism and, like most other Americans, cannot see "culture" except in white tie and tails. His consuming ambition is to become a bourgeois himself, and in this he is a carbon copy of his white fellow American.

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

All whites benefitted from American slavery.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.... I think it, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.

God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

Now in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn't want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.

A Negro has handicaps enough without having to pay taxes to support the education of white students to learn how to suppress him.

Nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

What did you expect? I don’t know why you’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.

Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

The confederacy’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not the equal of the white man and slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.