The Good Fight Quotes

“As one put it to me once, "I just wish white women would get as concerned about the health and well-being of black babies being born, as they are about me being able not to have babies.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“Richard Nixon won in forty-nine states by, for one thing, appealing to the inherent racism of the American people. Voters saw him—a Harris poll two months after the election showed this plainly—as the candidate who would put a stop to school busing and the encroachment of blacks and other minorities on white jobs”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“(The famous peace symbol, it is often forgotten, originally came from the semaphore code for N–D, meaning nuclear disarmament.)”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“But belief in the right of another to hold and publicly advocate the contrary point of view without having his motives impugned and his character maligned seems to me to be a fundamental tenet of our political system. This tolerance and mutual respect is fundamental to democracy's survival.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“The decline of civility and the mounting crudeness of language in our public life could also be another reason for the disgust of people with politicians and government officials and the contempt manifested toward them. The consequences for public debate and the rational, civilized conduct of public affairs are grave. This collapse in communication is terribly sad.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“They were there because I had declared that homosexuals' civil rights had been infringed by society, and advocated that their equality with heterosexuals be supported by the laws. The Boston gay militants were only showing their approval, although I could have wished they were not camping it up quite so flagrantly. But I was delighted with the expressions on the audience's faces, and I gave the young man a cordial greeting. It did not end there; for the rest of the afternoon, as we went on to a rally outdoors near a large housing project, the gays appointed themselves my advance men; voters' mouths hung open as they were handed literature by men in drag who urged, "Vote for Shirley on Tuesday!”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“But it was true that there was a parallel between George Wallace's candidacy and mine, and there were places—such as northern Florida and North Carolina—where we seemed to be the only two candidates in the field. Although we represented opposite poles on many questions of policy, we both spoke for groups who felt dispossessed by the establishment and alienated by the course our society is taking.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“When Governor Wallace was reported recovering and able to receive visitors at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland, I went to pay him a call. No two candidates, perhaps no two people, could differ more vehemently on many issues of public policy, but I could not see that this ought to have any relationship to our private behavior toward each other. With one of my Congressional staff aides and several Secret Service men, I drove out and spent twenty minutes with him. Governor Wallace seemed sincerely touched. He cried for a moment, and so did I. "Is that really you, Shirley?" he asked. "Have you come to see me?" What we talked about was nothing earthshaking; it was like almost any other sick call. I did say at one point, "You and I don't agree, but you've been shot, and I might be shot, and we are both children of American democracy, so I wanted to come and see you.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“The decline of civility and the mounting crudeness of language in our public life could also be another reason for the disgust of people with politicians and government officials and the contempt manifested toward them. The consequences for public debate and the rational, civilized conduct of public affairs are grave. This collapse in communication is terribly sad. It is a steady tearing asunder of the few threads which bind us together in a society undergoing massive change. It is sad, too, that so many of our public personalities lack size, that tolerance and generosity that spring from self-confidence and goodwill.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“The other candidates," I would say, " are going to be coming in here, or their campaign workers are and saying, 'Don't vote for Shirley Chisholm, because she has no chance to be President. Vote for somebody who can win.' Well if I can't be President, I can be an instrument for change. Why do you think people are running around saying I can't be President? They know I have the intellect and creative ability to put it together. That's why they are afraid. They know that I can't be bought; they know I can't be bossed. They know I can't be controlled. I am asking my brothers and sisters to give me a chance. The time has come when we no longer have to be passive recipients of whatever politicians of this nation may decree for us. We no longer have to remain disillusioned, apathetic, helpless and powerless. We now have a person who is willing to accept the snubs, the snide remarks, the humiliation and abuses because she dares to go against the tradition in this country—a country in which only white males can run for the Presidency. I am willing, because I understand.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“Somehow (and I am not sure the full story of how it happened ever became public) the three networks—CBS, ABC and NBC—wound up donating their weekly half-hour public affairs interview programs to the two candidates. "Meet the Press", "Face the Nation", and "Issues and Answers" were all stretched to an hour and rescheduled to provide, in effect, three one-hour debates between Humphrey and McGovern during the last full week before the California primary. Tom Asher filed a protest on my behalf with the Federal Communications Commission, citing section 315 of the Federal Communication Act, which says that if any broadcasting station permits itself to be used by any legally qualified candidate for an office, it must permit equal opportunities to all other candidates. The networks claimed that the three programs were regular interview shows, and exempt from the rule. The Federal Communications Commission upheld the networks, and Asher went to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Within hours after the FCC ruling, the court issued an order reversing the commission and ordering ABC and CBS each to provide me with one half-hour of prime air time. NBC had conceded earlier and scheduled me on one half-hour of its morning program, "Today.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“Some of the black and brown women on the NWPC Policy Council became the strongest and most valuable supporters I had—Fannie Lou Hamer, Lupe Anguiano, Gwen Cherry and Carol Taylor, among others. They did not have the one problem with my candidacy that many white women did: the whites knew I couldn't be elected, and so their support, even when it was given, seemed a little tentative, because they felt they were fighting for a lost cause. But women like Fannie Lou, Lupe and the rest, having been long active in the civil rights movement and other minority causes, were used to taking up seemingly impossible challenges. Their whole experience had taught them that they might not win the ultimate objective, but they would increase the chance that success would come, someday.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“We never did lack for eager volunteers, but there was no one who could give them [Florida volunteers] clear-cut directions. Some work was duplicated while other chores were left undone. The national office in Washington was in the same plight. In the confusion, local jealousies and rivalries thrived. Compared with the professional and well-financed campaigns of the other candidates, mine did not inspire confidence. There were countless damaging results; a trip to St. Petersburg was rescheduled five times and finally cancelled four days before the last date agreed on, but no one in Tampa thought to tell the St. Petersburg TImes, and its reporter went out and waited for me to arrive. It was not a good way to treat one of the state's leading newspapers.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“Muskie, Lindsay, Humphrey, and Jackson were pouring about half a million dollars each into the campaign. In the end, I would spend less than $10,000. It was all I had; there was no alternative to depending on volunteers.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“Busing," I told audience after audience,"is an artificial way of solving the segregation problem." Open housing is the real answer, I said. But as long as the problem exists, an artificial solution is better than none. Then I would let them have it. "Where were you," I asked the whites," when for years black children were being bused out of their neighborhoods and carried miles on old rattletrap buses to go down back roads to a dirty school with a tarpaper roof and no toilets? If you believed in neighborhood schools, where were you then? I'm not going to shed any crocodile tears for you now that you've discovered the busing problem." If there was any other candidate in the Florida primary who was taking a similarly strong stand in the face of public agitation over the phony busing issue, I have yet to read about it. Jackson lined up with Wallace; Humphrey took so many stands that no one could pin him down, but the impression he left was that he was against busing; McGovern, Lindsay and Muskie equivocated. It was a sorry performance, and one that George Wallace did not fail to seize on—all the Northern liberals suddenly talking out of both sides of their mouths when they came down South looking for votes. Shirley Chisholm, he was to say repeatedly, was the only other candidate who said the same things in the South that she said in the North.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“The truth is I have never been a strong advocate of busing, as the bureaucrats put it, "to correct racial imbalance." The root cause of segregated schools is racism—economic and social discrimination against dark-skinned citizens. One school is crowded with black children because their parents have been herded into that neighborhood by the bigoted white majority; busing some of the blacks to a white school is not doing anything to erase the real problem. The only good I could ever see in it was the chance that, when white children in turn are bused into formerly black schools, the school board would suddenly see the wisdom of improving those schools and giving them a fair share of the annual budget.”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“As long as the nation permits doctors to run the show, that”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“In 1972, we Americans need the best collective abilities of all our people. We Americans need to lift the burdens of unfairness and discrimination from the shoulders of so many of our fellow countrymen, of both sexes, all ages, and all races. This is why I call for tax reform, to ensure that each man pays his fair share based on his income; that is why I call for welfare reform and a national system of day care centers, to minimize the number of families in the aid-to-dependent children (ADC) category of state social services budgets. And that is why I call for equal justice before the law, for young as well as old, black as well as white, and poor as well as rich. . . .”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight

“(I do not exaggerate; key votes have been lost because members whose votes were being counted on were in the gym).”
― Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight