Nelson Mandela Quotes

Every institution where a number of the coloured races are, or can be drawn together, shall be broken up… If we destroy, or prevent the building of the nest, we shall not be liable to the incursions of the brood.

White supremacy and the sickness that it produces disallows us [Blacks] to perceive reality properly.

All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life, but with the product of these conditions, the Negro himself.

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

There is a racist virus in the American blood stream...

The possibility of a liberal capitalist democracy in South Africa is exactly nil. The racialist propaganda amongst the whites and their desire to maintain what they imagine to be a profitable situation makes it utterly unthinkable that there can be a political alignment that favours a liberal white group. In any case the political immorality, cowardice and vacillation of the so—called progressives amongst the whites render them utterly useless as a force against fascism.

Certainly let the black man have the franchise on the same terms as the white man, but while a Kaffir may make as good a Prime Minister as Lord Beaconsfield, for at least the next hundred years we shall not choose to be ruled by him.

I am astonished at the strong feeling of dislike and contempt—I might almost say hatred—which the bulk of the whites have for their black neighbours.

It is impossible for white men to live with the coloured races without adopting a conviction that…they have the right to command the services of the less civilized.

I beg that some shadow of a colour bar, some little inequality between white and black before the law be retained.

If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

If you are black the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood.

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience

White people scare the crap out of me... I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord... never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here— have a nice day

Is it not rather our duty to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories…. Negro equality will be abundant, as every white laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave niggers.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.