Eric Ries Quotes

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

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

NASA didn't give a crap what gender you were or what race you were. If you could do the math, you were valuable.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

All men will commence in their present rank and promotion will be open to all men alike, without any distinctions or qualifications, political or otherwise.

Everybody has equal opportunity, and I think that is true for everything.

Now, as a nation, we don't promise equal outcomes, but we were founded on the idea everybody should have an equal opportunity to succeed. No matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, you can make it. That's an essential promise of America. Where you start should not determine where you end up.

All sports must be treated on the basis of equality.

You just want to be judged against everyone fairly.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

The tech and tech media world are meritocracies. To fall back to race as the reason why people don't break out in our wonderful oasis of openness is to do a massive injustice to what we've fought so hard to create.

The promise of the American Dream requires that we are all provided an equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to our nation.

Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.

All children should have equal opportunities.

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

Our aim is a totally new and just constitutional dispension in which every inhabitant will enjoy equal rights, treatment and opportunity in every sphere of endeavour—constitutional, social and economic.

It is the policy of the state [of New York] that the American ideal of equality of opportunity requires that students ... be admitted to educational institutions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, or national origin.

Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race

The colored employees of the Government shall be treated precisely as the whites are treated. If they attend to their duty they will not be disturbed.

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 have always been for absolute equality of privileges and obligations.

Everybody has his place; everybody is equal. Treated equally, equal standing, equal rights and status.