No one wants to see self-destructive riots because there's no future in riots.
In many ways Africa subsidised America and Europe's development.
A man who cannot be enticed by money or intimidated by the threat of jail or death has two of the strongest weapons that anyone has to offer.
America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth.
The invasion only made matters worse. The occupation will not work, Iraq is unoccupiable, that will not work.
If you and I got on an airplane, you're going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I'm going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance.
When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
That Obama I would like to cut his nuts off.
Life has its dimensions in the mysterious.
Suffering breeds character. Character breeds faith. And in the end, faith will not disappoint. Faith, hope, and dreams will prevail... Our time has come. Our time has come. Our time has come.
Politicians refuse to modernize schools, they cut out midnight basketball, but build all these new jails. First class jails, second class schools. This is zero tolerance.
We've removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams.
The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.
When everyone is included, everyone wins.
I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.
The wiping out of millions of homes took away Black and Brown wealth. It drove poverty, it drove unemployment, it drove people to food stamps.
Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.
If you fall behind, run faster. Never give up, never surrender, and rise up against the odds.
If you run, you might lose. If you don't run, you're guaranteed to lose.
In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.
When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.
We live on the dash between our birth date and our death date.
We must know the difference between sweat and tears. Sweat is wet. Tears are wet. Sweat is salty. Tears are salty. But progress comes through sweat. Progress never came through tears.
Most poor people are not on welfare. . . I know they work. I'm a witness. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people's children. They work every day. They clean the streets. They work every day. They drive vans with cabs. They work every day. They change beds you slept in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work every day . . .
Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.
Dream big dreams! Others may deprive you of your material wealth and cheat you in a thousand ways, but no man can deprive you of the control and use of your imagination. Men may deal with you unfairly, as men often do; they may deprive you of your liberty; but they cannot take from you the privilege of using your imagination. In your imagination you always win!
My very first recollection of life on earth was waking up in bed with my mother, and she was showing me a picture of my father, Charles Jackson, with a group of soldiers.
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.
See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based... I want to cut his nuts off. Barack, he's talking down to black people.
No lie can live forever.
To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. Your children need your presence more than your presents.
We picked their cotton. We cooked their food. We nursed their babies. Now we can run their cities. We can run their states. We will run the country.
What's good for the very rich might not be good for anybody but them.
I take my role seriously as a pastor.
Semi-automatic weapons are not just about gun control, they're about national security. You know that these weapons can shoot down airplanes, they can blow up railroads. This is really a whole national security issue.
You cannot teach what you don't know. You cannot give energy if you're not on fire on the inside.
From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.
Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.
When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.
Our goal was not freedom. Freedom was the necessary prerequisite to get to equality.
You can't teach what you don't know. And you can't lead where you don't go.
The only justification we have to look down on someone is because we are about to pick him up.
It is a historical error for those who were not there to just refer to August 28th as 'I Have a Dream' speech day. That is a real disservice to those who were there. It was a sad day. It was not a celebration environment.
Our dreams must be stronger than our memories.
has done a great job walking a thin line between revenge and remedy.
We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive.
Our dreams must be stronger than our memories. We must be pulled by our dreams, rater than pushed by our memories.
We are facing a stiff wind right now, but if we persist and keep fighting back, we will prevail.
When I was a boy we were poor and we had to make do with what we had. So my grandma used to make us quits that we used for blankets. She couldn't afford to go to the store and buy a blanket -- so she'd take scraps of cloth and sew them together. there'd be different colors and different patterns and different types of cloth -- but they all went together to make that big quilt to keep us warm.
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.
We must all learn a good lesson - how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world... learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.
The crown jewel of Dr. King`s movement was to protect the right to vote for all citizens.
While I've spent a lot of quality time with my children, perhaps it's not been enough.
I hear that melting pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.
If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.
If the right wing has their way and state's rights control voting rights, they would remove protections that make it difficult for seniors to vote. It would be harder for students to vote on campus. These are attempts to suppress acts of voting.
When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.
Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.
If you wear a hoodie but aren't registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.
I cast my bread on the waters long ago. Now it's time for you to send it back to me - toasted and buttered on both sides.
There was a direct jobs program from the Rooselvelt administration in the 1930s. The Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate the banks and the mortgage crisis but that's a little too late. Whenever they report they will report the obvious. It will be too late to impact the people who need the help the most.
His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.
Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.
I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.
We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.
Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.
You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate.
Each time a barrier falls for one person, the doors of opportunity open wider for every other American.
You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and unwinnable.
That's just like America. It's made up of lots of different people. We're all different colors, different ages, we do different jobs -- but it takes all of us black people, white people, brown people, men and women, young and old, working in the factories, working in the fields, working in offices, working in stores -- it takes a lot of different kinds of people to get the job done for America.
Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.
Leaders must be tough enough to fight, tender enough to cry, human enough to make mistakes, humble enough to admit them, strong enough to absorb the pain, and resilient enough to bounce back and keep on moving.
At the end of the day, we're defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high.
Tears will get you sympathy, sweat will get you change.
It's not enough to be quiet. Quietness is the absence of noise. We need peace, the presence of justice and to be - and so people here can coexist and live together.
Watch the walls come down, whether it's in the South or on Wall Street. When the walls come down, what do we find? More markets, more talent, more capital and growth. Which means that the race and sex discrimination stunt economic growth. It's not good for capitalism. It's not good for America's growth. And it's not morally right.
Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.
You know, people'd always ask "Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?" They never seen the house I'm running from.
In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.
Black and Jewish leaders have been a coalition of conscience.
What we have to be judged by is the work we try to do. It's public service, not perfect service.
It is in struggle and service with our brothers and sisters, individually and collectively, that we find the meaning of life.
If you don't know what tomorrow holds, you need to know who holds tomorrow!
Race designation is a political designation.
If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.
If you try you may fail, if you don't try you're guaranteed to fail.
Unfortunate. Unfortunate. Sometimes people struggling for freedom lose their way.
In tough economic times, desperate people do desperate things, and the abortion rate goes up.
The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.
At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.
Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.
Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don't know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics.
People internalize, from the jail to student loan debt, to credit card debt, to unemployment to the whole collective. It manifests itself in many ways, in people's home lives, domestic stuff.
It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.
Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.
I want to cut his nuts off.
That's all Hymie wants to talk about is Israel. Every time you go to Hymietown that's all they want to talk about.
We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got north to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan, and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history.
My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.
You may not be responsible for being down, but you must be responsible for getting up.
Luck is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity meet
The only justification for ever looking down on somebody is to pick them up.
Nobody will save us from us but us.
A man must be willing to die for justice. Death is an inescapable reality and men die daily, but good deeds live forever.
I am - Somebody. I may be poor, but I am - Somebody! I may be on welfare, but I am - Somebody! I may be uneducated, but I am - Somebody! I must be, I'm God's child. I must be respected and protected. I am black and I am beautiful! I am - Somebody! Soul Power!
I came to the conclusion that in order to end racial barriers, I needed to run for the office of the president and put forth an agenda of social justice and world peace. In addition, I concluded that someone needed to run and challenge the liberal orthodoxy.
Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.
I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.
The only time you should look down at someone, is when you are helping them up.
For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.
The trouble is that nonviolence is so often defined as refusal to fight, and that is the American definition of cowardice. In fact, marching unarmed against the guns and dogs of the police requires more courage than does aggression. The perverted idea of manhood coming from the barrel of a gun is what keeps people from understanding nonviolence.
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.
Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.
You can't plant a seed and pick the fruit the next morning.
Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.
We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular. There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. After all we have been through, just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.
God doesn't make orange juice, God makes oranges.
I was blessed to go abroad and bring Americans home from jail in Syria, and Iraq, and Cuba, and Yugoslavia, and Liberia, those are high moments of my life.
The charges that I am anti-Semitic are simply erroneous, felonious, and unceremonious. In fact, when I need a doctor, I always look for one with a Jewish name.
Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. Jesus said that we should not be judged by the bark we wear but by the fruit that we bear. Jesus said that we must measure greatness by how we treat the least of these.
When God rang the bell that ended the fight, the world cried out for one more round.
The liberation of Blacks is not for Blacks only.
