JR Quotes

I fight against racism and bigotry because I care about the people who are experiencing it.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I want the white people to understand my people.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

The Trail of Tears should teach all of us the importance of respect for others who are different from ourselves and compassion for those who have difficulties.

Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there's a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say 'Why? Where's this disparity coming from, and why can't we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?' We're terrified of facing ourselves.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

Becoming involved in sports and traveling the world and seeing how people of color were treated around the world, and America being such a great nation, probably the greatest nation in the world, I think that the thing that would destroy this nation more than anything is the inequality that we have amongst people of color.

In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

While we try to amass wealth, make piles of money, get hold of the land as our real property, overtop one another in riches, we have palpably cast off justice, and lost the common good. I should like to know how any man can be just, who is deliberately aiming to get out of someone else what he wants for himself.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves

People have so manipulated the concept of freedom that it finally boils down to the right of the stronger and richer to take from the weaker and poorer whatever they still have.

Oppression is as American as apple pie.

Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.

We do have a Godly heritage in America, but we have been robbed - robbed by the 3 percent.

It doesn't do any good to just be on the side of black people. The funnier comedic position is to be on the side of oppressed people in general.

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches.