White Man Quotes

• You can put a cat in an oven, but that don't make it a biscuit.

  Wesley Snipes

  Cat, Biscuits, Ovens

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• The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.

  Robert Mugabe

  Men, Zimbabwe, Evil

  "Not a black and white story" by Blessing-Miles Tendi, www.theguardian.com. August 28, 2008.

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• As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

  Harper Lee

  Respect, Black And White, Men

  To Kill a Mockingbird ch. 23 (1960)

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• A widow of doubtful age will marry almost any sort of a white man.

  Horace Greeley

  Men, Age, Widows

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• The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

  James A. Baldwin

  Real, Men, Justice

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• The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

  Frantz Fanon

  Men, Color, He Man

  Frantz Fanon (2008). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.205, Grove Press

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• If the white man gives you anything - just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.

  Fannie Lou Hamer

  Men, White, Giving

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• The black man should seek to be, and he should be encouraged to be, the best possible black man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.

  Warren G. Harding

  Men, Black, Being The Best

  "The Christian Science Monitor" Newspaper, October 27, 1921.

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• I can't tell a story in the white man's language, so I say what I want to say with my paintings.

  Allen Sapp

  Men, Stories, Want

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• True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all the blackness in the big old slave castle?

  Ayi Kwei Armah

  Real, Fighting, Men

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• I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

  Frantz Fanon

  Song, Heart, Intelligent

  Frantz Fanon (2008). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.27, Grove Press

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• If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow.

  Chief Joseph

  Native American, Men, White

  Lincoln Hall Speech in Washington D.C., January 14, 1879.

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• Saw myself naked in front of a mirror a couple days ago - that's not the joke, that's what we called the setup. I saw myself naked, and I said, 'Holy cow, I'm 'The White Man.' I've heard a lot of bad things about you, cracka.

  Daniel Tosh

  Couple, Men, Mirrors

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• Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

  Brigham Young

  Father, Men, Blood

  Journal of Discourses, vol. 10, p. 110, 1863.

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• You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.

  Marcus Garvey

  Lying, Men, Competition

  Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey (1923). “The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans”, The Majority Press

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• No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

  Booker T. Washington

  Food, Men, Thinking

  W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington (2012). “Three African-American Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, p.47, Courier Corporation

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• Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

  Alexander H. Stephens

  Philosophical, Men, Race

  Cornerstone Speech, Delivered 21 March 1861, Savannah, Georgia

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• Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

  Josephine Baker

  Eye, Men, Years

  "Contemporary Social Issues" by Raymond Lawrence Lee, p.488, 1955.

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• Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pcanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.

  Tecumseh

  Summer, Powerful, Native American

  Quoted in Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)

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• As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

  Maya Angelou

  Lonely, Loneliness, Book

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.393, Modern Library

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• If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.

  Janet Campbell Hale

  Men, Games, Play

  Janet Campbell Hale (1987). “The Jailing of Cecelia Capture”, p.58, UNM Press

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• We were then in a dangerous, helpless situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst savages and wild beasts, not a white man in the country but ourselves.

  Daniel Boone

  Country, Men, Savages

  John Filson, Daniel Boone (1793). “The discovery, settlement and present state of Kentucky, and an introduction to the topography and natural history of that ... country. Also colonel Daniel Boon's narrative of the wars of Kentucky”, p.36

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• They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Justice, Stronger

  The Bear pt. 4 (1932)

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• Suppose a white man should come to me and say, "Joseph, I like your horses. I want to buy them." I say to him, "No, my horses suit me; I will not sell them." Then he goes to my neighbor and says to him, "Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell." My neighbor answers, "Pay me the money and I will sell you Joseph's horses." The white man returns to me and says, "Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them." If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they bought them.

  Chief Joseph

  I Like You, Horse, Native American

  Arguing against the right of the US Government to force his people to leave their lands, 1876.

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• It was the law that if a white man was caught trying to educate a Negro slave, he was liable to prosecution entailing a fine of fifty dollars and a jail sentence. . . Our ignorance was the greatest hold the South had on us. We knew we could run away, but what then?

  John W. Campbell

  Running, Ignorance, Men

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