Jonathan Coleman Quotes

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.

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.

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.

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

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.

I think it's worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.

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

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

Segregation has no place in the education system.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

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.

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

A minority group has 'arrived' only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

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

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

What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.

I want a fair housing bill. We’ve got to end this Goddamn discrimination against Negroes. Until people, whether they’re purple, brown, black, yellow, red, green, or whatever – live together, they’ll never know they have the same hopes for their children, the same fears, troubles, woes, ambitions.

If the spirit of equality means anything, it means like opportunity, and if we once lose like opportunity, we lose the only chance we have toward equality throughout the nation.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.