Mario Cuomo Quotes

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own time.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable.

The world is an enormous injustice.

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.

The glaring injustice is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.

This is a hard job to do …. We represent the underdog, and that makes the top dogs angry.

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

I believe one half of the world is born for the convenience of the other half

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel - it's vulgar.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.