Desmond Tutu Quotes

It is very significant – their songs about the oppressed people…. A race who can sing these songs like that will cause trouble one of these days.

You had better — all you people at the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this [slavery] question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

Paradoxically, just at the point when racist attitudes were declining in society and many ethnic groups were integrating successfully, our political leaders became obsessed with racism.

You have a race problem that must be solved, or else you will alienate every non-white person on this earth within the next few years, or within the next few months.

There in the midst of German life is an alien and isolated race of men. Loud and self-conscious in their dress, hot-blooded and restless in their manner. An Asiatic horde on the sandy plains of Prussia. Forming among themselves a close corporation, rigorously shut off from the rest of the world.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng, men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav. Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn, these bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Ttose, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws in street and alley. What strange tongues are loud accents of menace alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

I think the American people would be compassionate and practical. But we need to be talking about assimilation as well, something that is politically incorrect, I know, to say that people should learn English, should learn American exceptionalism, shouldn't come here to use our freedoms to undermine the freedoms we give to everybody. But there's nothing wrong with saying people who want to come here should want to be Americans.

The melting-pot idea is futile ... The brew in a melting pot is always boiling over.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Race relations can be an appropriate issue... but only if you want to craft solutions, and not catalogue complaints. If we use the issue appropriately, we can transform it from the cancer of our society into the cure.

When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

In times of change and uncertainty, we need the spirit of jazz more than ever before, to bring people - especially young women and men - together, to nurture freedom and dialogue, to create new bridges of respect and understanding, for greater tolerance and cooperation.

All my friends were black and Mexican. I was the only white kid in our group and had to work hard to be accepted. Year after year, we'd breakdance and we all became close and they labeled me "Vanilla" - like "Hey, Vanilla" and they knew I hated it, so of course they kept calling me it.

The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis. The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.

I find that because of modern technological evolution and our global economy, and as a result of the great increase in population, our world has greatly changed: it has become much smaller. However, our perceptions have not evolved at the same pace; we continue to cling to old national demarcations and the old feelings of 'us' and 'them'.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

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

Ever since [Donald]Trump has been opening his big mouth, you're seeing all these bitter people, latent racists who are becoming emboldened. You're seeing some ugly stuff happening around this country.

The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.