John Lewis Quotes

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

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.

Apartheid cannot be reformed. It has to be eliminated.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

Many times, people attack the well-to-do people. They see an opportunity.

George W. Bush has helped those who have most, hurt those who have least and ignored everyone in between.

Segregation by race has declined gradually since 1970, but separation by income has grown steadily in the same period.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.