John Ridley Quotes

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

I don't want to have people brought in simply because they are black or Asian.

Old white guys can be a funny bunch, can't they? The same anti-same-sex marriage, anti-affirmative action cadre can flower into the biggest supporters of 'equality' the minute they get a whiff of minority empowerment.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

If the party members want 15 left handed, Lithuanian lesbians they can have them.

The only way you get to the goal of color blindness is to be color conscious along the way.

I am working for the time when unqualified Blacks, Browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.

Without affirmative action I could never have attended Yale University. Without affirmative action Barack Obama would never have gotten into Colombia and Harvard Law school

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

I don't think quotas are necessarily an evil. I think when we look at industry in general back to the '60s and the '50s, the way more diverse people like my dad and mom's generation were able to break into industry was because of affirmation action, because of quotas.

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Since governmental quotas expand bureaucratic power, provoke a backlash and are unfair to individuals, we need to find a better way to increase minority opportunities.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.

Republicans constantly claim to be the party that defends the Constitution. We have no legitimate right to that claim until we get right on gay rights.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

People of color and women are increasingly being shown on-screen. For things to be whitewashed just doesn't make sense.

There's a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we've arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

I don't think President Obama has been that revolutionary in reaching out to ethnic communities. President Reagan did a lot for the black community that people don't realize.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.