David Dinkins Quotes

The conversation about race is inevitable. It's one that people know that we have to have and continue to have.

I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.

The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.

[Van Jones] you should be a racial polemicist. You should be a racial reconciler.

Solve the race problem here, and once you solve the race problem here, you don't have to send these billions of dollars abroad.

I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.

In many people's many people's minds this is the sole reason Barack Obama was elected. He was elected to fix race relations.

Despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

There are definitely racial problems in this country [the USA]. Comedy is a way we can figure out how to solve it, and how to solve it without making people really angry.

The goal is to keep the dialogue open. There are issues in the USA that a lot of people feel strongly about. The goal is just to fix those issues. To make progress on those issues.

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community.

I have seen girls tackle every single big problem from cancer to lead poisoning to climate change to homelessness to bullying in schools. There is literally no problem that we can't solve.

There are so many issues, so many opportunities to bring people together who have different perspectives, to develop action plans, and to have a significant impact on those issues.

The white race is doomed not because it's white but because of its misdeeds.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

I know that so many of us hoped that, by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. But, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

I appeal to the Youth and those on the ground: start talking to each other across divisions of race and political organizations.

The NAACP is a wonderful organization . . . But do you realize if tomorrow morning we had complete integration, all them cats would be outta work?

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

I think, the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of "We want society to see what's happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways." And those impulses I very much understand.

Here comes Jesse Jackson, he talks of common ground. Does that common ground include me, or is it just a sound?

A more just world is possible. In most of the global issues, and also in so many of the development issues I'm involved in in our region, the young people that I am working with are seizing the tools at their disposal and trying to use them well, for issues far larger than their immediate personal benefit and concerns. That's what gives me hope.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.