"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
— Lily Tomlin

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
— Alice Walker

"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
— Toni Morrison

"Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought."
— Kathryn Stockett (The Help)

"The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, and not of kind, even as there is between trees of the same species.
Where in is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
— Susan Sontag

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
— Nelson Mandela

"I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better."
— Thurgood Marshall

""A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me." "
— Barack Obama

"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise."
— Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)

"Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know?"
— Chris Rock

"I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on "Seinfeld.""
— Aaron McGruder

"Um, yeah. For instance, take, you know, take, for instance, the issue of -- I'm drawing a blank, and I hate it when I do that, particularly on television.
-- potential McCain VP candidate Mark Sanford, asked on CNN to name differences in economic policy between Bush and McCain"
— Mark Sanford

"Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion."
— bell hooks (killing rage: Ending Racism)

"To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.

If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)

"And like flowers in the fields, that make wonderful views, when we stand side-by-side in our wonderful hues..

We all make a beauty so wonderfully true.
We are special and different, and just the same, too!

So whenever you look at your beautiful skin, from your wiggling toes to your giggling grin...

Think how lucky you are that the skin you live in, so beautifully holds the "You" who's within."
— Michael Tyler (The Skin You Live In)

"John McCain’s plan to balance the budget by 2013 may have just taken the prize for Most Ridicule Sustained in a 24-Hour Period. (Before that, McCain's and Clinton’s gas-tax holiday proposals held the title.) The biggest gripe: It’s hard to see how McCain would sustain the Bush tax cuts, which the CBO estimates would create a $443 billion deficit by 2013, and still find room for his estimated $300 billion in additional tax proposals while also eliminating the deficit."
— Christopher Beam

""If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.""
— Frank B. Wilderson III

"I have a dream that one day people will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid."
— Leonard Michaels (The Collected Stories)

"Don't go into the pimped out fridge, Jack..."
— Jack Bruno

"I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards."
— Alberto Salazar

"High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work."
— Thomas Keneally (Searching for Schindler)

""Some folks call her a runaway. A failure in the race. But she knows where her ticket takes her. She will find her place in the sun""
— Tracy Chapman

""Friendship is greater than the colonial and dominating race ideologies of hundreds of years." -"Some of My Best Friends""
— Luis Rodriguez

"I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro...' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have."
— Samuel R. Delaney

"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
— Booker T. Washington

"All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

"I get offered movie roles all the time, and I say, 'No! No, I don't want to play a manicurist!' I don't want to play a really pissed-off liquor store owner, I don't want to go nowhere with a chicken under my arm, I don't want to play an exceptionally good student, I do not want to get off a tour bus and take numerous photographs, I do not ever want to utter the phrase, 'Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond,' I don't want to write down all my memoirs about being a geisha [...], I don't want to drown my baby in a bathtub, I do not want to be in any musical where there's gonna be a helicopter! What it is is that I CANNOT RUN UP A WALL!"
— Margeret Cho