John Lewis Quotes

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

My films are motivated by a keen interest in highlighting issues that affect marginalized populations who are caught in difficult circumstances.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

I happen to think that conservatism, when properly applied to the 21st century, could actually help everybody. And the message of Trump's campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, black Americans and so forth. That really bothered me.

I see social mobility and equality of opportunity as really successful Canadian values.

The world is a little more diverse in 2015 than when the Fantastic Four comic first came out in 1961.

Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.

We only have to recall the color of the faces of those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

I consider myself to be blessed. I have a family that is a mix of different religions and different ethnicities. I hope everyone can look beyond the bikini or beyond the whole beauty pageant stereotype of Miss USA, and realize that what I'm doing is more significant than just that. It represents the United States as a country of opportunity, where you can do anything you want to, and ethnicity and religion cannot stop you.

I've been in this struggle for many years now. I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don't care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling.

There are people out there that feel there are injustices being made and happening in the USA on a daily basis.

We all have a large stake in preserving our democracy, but I maintain that those without power in our society, the black, the brown, the poor of all colors, have the largest stake not because we have the most to lose, but because we have worked the hardest, and given the most, for what we have achieved.

I think drugs affect poor people and people of color more than anyone.

We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. "I know what is best for you," but they don't know what is best for us! It is time now to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

I think that in L.A., one thing that nobody will ever talk about is, for instance, how just one in five kids in L.A. County is white, so when you're looking out there, it's a very brown city.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.