quotes from classic

What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

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Having personally watched the Voting Rights Act being signed into law that August day, I can't begin to imagine how we could have all been so wrong in believing that more Americans would vote once they were all truly free to do so.

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I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.

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I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

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Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

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Profits should be for a purpose. Profits should be productive. You should make money for producing benefits that make the world a better place. Making money is a good thing when it is made in service to humanity or the democracy.

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If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

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We've changed in the sense that we flipped - and this is no longer the Republican party of Lincoln. This is the party of suppression.

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Wishing of all strategies, is the worst.

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I wouldn't listen to my parents, but I found out that I absorbed. I never heard what they said - told me - but I did what they did.

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I was much more comfortable and a much better congressman running in a district that was 37 percent black, where I had to have a white constituency to get elected, than I would have been if I was in a 75 percent black district.

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In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.

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Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

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I see the war problem as an economic problem, a business problem, a cultural problem, an educational problem - everything but a military problem. There's no military solution. There is a business solution - and the sooner we can provide jobs, not with our money, but the United States has to provide the framework.

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The two are not mutually exclusive, but we think we can have wealth without good ideas and without values and without a clear vision. Wealth without vision is insanity.

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Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.

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If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

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Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

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Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.

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One of the principles of nonviolence is that you leave your opponents whole and better off than you found them.

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