Augustus Hawkins Quotes

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

I don't know how one would define an affirmative-action hire. I ultimately do not know what role race played in my hiring.

A full commitment to integration means taking all reasonable steps to dismantle these barriers, even if this necessitates reforming long established practices that were not imposed with the intent to disadvantage the racial minorities but do so nonetheless.

I am the perfect affirmative action baby.

If somebody walks in to me and says, 'I'm a gay person, I want a job in your office,' I would say that's inappropriate, and they wouldn't be hired because that would mean they are promoting their agenda.

So, Mr. President, what is wrong with the fair employment practice bill?

I am not in favour of quotas. Just put the best person into the job. It is not about gender; it is about experience, leadership and vision.

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

I believe employment regulations for women, whereby the prospective employer is not able to inquire about the interviewee's status regarding children, childcare, or indeed their intention of becoming a parent, are counterproductive.

I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some.

You want to feel like people are hiring you because they want to work with you, not because of who your parents are.

Today, currently, business owners can go out and find out if the person they are hiring is eligible to work here or if they are not. We need to think about how we are impacting workers.

The Bush administration is the most diverse in history because the president fills jobs on the basis of a person's capabilities and qualifications, not on the color of his or her skin.

During those twelve hour nights we’d chat about the motormen, conductors, guards etc. whose conditions were even worse. They had to work a ‘spread’ of 16 hours each day in order to get 10 hours pay. Negro workers could get jobs only as porters. They were subjected to treatment that makes Little Rock and Birmingham seem liberal and respectable by comparison … I also saw Catholic ticket agents fired by Catholic bosses for going to mass early in the morning while the porter ‘covered’ the booth for half an hour. Protestant bosses fired Protestant workers for similar crimes — going to church. The Jewish workers had no trouble with the subway bosses — Jews were denied employment in the transit lines.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

Judges cannot mandate Black or Hispanic excellence.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

Government should not deny to any of its citizens that which it gives to other citizens.

I am working for the time when unqualified Blacks, Browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.

Affirmative action is the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

Papists should be debarred from all public trust.

We present as a grievance the want of a law to prevent the hiring out of negro tradesmen, to the great discouragement of the white workmen coming into this province.

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

It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne.

I will never allow non-Bumiputra students to enter Universiti Teknologi Mara. I will not compromise on this matter.