Politics Quotes

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection."

"The burden of being a dark-skinned man in this world."

"The Southerner may be proud to speak of his ignorance, while the Northerner must conceal it."

"Politics is the arena where we negotiate who gets to be fully human."

"Anger and fear seem to have come into our country as two enormous bullies."

"Democracy requires citizens who think, not merely follow."

"When you get down to it, slavery is an intellectual concept as much as it is a physical one."

"Politics should serve the people, not the people serve politics."

"I have seen humans reduced to commodities, and it has shaped everything I write."

"Invisibility is not a physical condition but a psychological one imposed by society."

"Dis is the danger of dis great democracy—dat you are not born yesterday."

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

"The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power."

"To be black in America is in some ways like being inoculated against optimism."

"You think you understand America, but you do not understand America at all."

"Silence is not the absence of language; silence is the language of the oppressed."

"Politics should serve the people, not the other way around."

"A nation thrives when it respects the voice of the individual."

"Politics corrupts the honest."

"Politics should serve the people, not divide them."

"The Negro was not supposed to understand fully, just believe."

"It does not follow that because a man makes a mule of himself, that he must lose his voting rights."

"One cannot protest what one does not fully understand."

"Americans are rather like bad children: they have wonderful qualities, but you do wish they would not sprawl all over the world."

"Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country."

"The bank is something else. The bank is like a monster."

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

"Forget all national symbols and business men."

"Our inheritance of well-built party machinery does us yeoman service."

"No man who is ambitious for power can ever be said to be truthful."