Affirmative Quotes - Page 3

• Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn't. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn't provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues.

  William Julius Wilson

  Leader, Black, Helping

  Interview With Gerald Early, www.motherjones.com. September/October 1996.

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• This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Strong, Nature, Writing

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• Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

  Jack Kemp

  Ideas, Liberty, Quota

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• I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.

  Dick Gephardt

  Strong, Believe, Fighting

  "Gephardt Admits Mistake on Race Issues in '70s", www.foxnews.com. January 11, 2004.

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• I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action.

  Joe Lieberman

  Support, Action, Affirmative Action

  "Gore jets to Los Angeles to join rallying Democrats" by Ian Christopher McCaleb, www.cnn.com.

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• Today's announcement projects a picture of profound weakness in U.S. diplomacy. It should not have been a heavy lift for our diplomats in New York and in foreign capitals to recruit the necessary 96 affirmative votes to seat the United States in the new council.

  Tom Lantos

  New York, Profound, Weakness

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• Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Men, Expression, Law

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• The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.

  Charles A. Murray

  Government, People, Police

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• I'm pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment and pro-labor. I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America or I was going to be a happy Democrat.

  Wesley Clark

  America, Choices, Action

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• Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.

  Cornel West

  Thinking, Action, Crucial

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Affirmative action ignores our society's real minorities - members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those "minorities" at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Real, Class, Race

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Jobs, Thinking, Race

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

  Cornel West

  Children, People, Action

  "Cornel West Reconsiders President Obama". "Talk of the Nation" with Tony Cox, www.npr.org. August 2, 2010.

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• If Barack Obama believes there are no victims in U.S, then I assume he'll shut down all the civil rights offices throughout the federal government, starting with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. If there are no victims, all affirmative action laws will immediately be repealed. Same thing for equity in pay.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Believe, Justice, Office

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Donald Trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that respond to public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own.

  Barney Frank

  People, Done, Importance

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• Didn't we settle contraception & affirmative action? If the GOP keep going backwards they'll soon be debating slavery.

  Andy Borowitz

  Slavery, Action, Settling

  FaceBook post by Andy Borowitz from Feb 26, 2012

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• Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.

  John B. S. Haldane

  Believe, Animal, Perfection

  "The Causes of Evolution". Book by John B. S. Haldane, 1932.

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• You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action.

  J. C. Watts

  Children, Giving, Black

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• During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives - they were the wives of male executives. As long as her income came from her husband, she was not feeling generous when affirmative action let another woman have a head start vying for her husband's (her) income.

  Warren Farrell

  New York, Husband, Years

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• Fundamentally, if the league is going to have a no-tolerance policy for domestic abuse, if we're going to be a global organization that's going to have this as a perspective, we've got to back it up. We can't be backed into it with a video with more coming out. We have to make an affirmative stand on it.

  Steve Young

  Organization, League, Perspective

  "Steve Young Calls Out The NFL For Only Banning Ray Rice Because The Elevator Video Came Out" by Tony Manfred, www.businessinsider.com. September 08, 2014.

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• I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

  Quentin Bryce

  Support, Special, Needs

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• Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women.

  Faye Wattleton

  Thinking, Doors, Race

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• I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

  Ben Lerner

  Artist, Stupidity, Culture

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can`t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can`t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.

  Christopher Caldwell

  Strong, Moving, World

  Christopher Caldwell (2009). “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West”, p.313, Penguin UK

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• I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too.

  Henry Louis Gates

  School, Thinking, Virginia

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. October 21, 2013.

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