Julian Bond Quotes

#1. I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

Julian Bond

#2. I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years.

Julian Bond

#3. But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches - the grassroots - kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well.

Julian Bond

#4. The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

Julian Bond

#5. Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.

Julian Bond

#6. It takes people who have a widespread series of experiences to develop future leaders. It takes people who aren't afraid to challenge and move forward.

Julian Bond

#7. As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

Julian Bond

#8. We know that if whites and nonwhites vote in the same percentages as they did in 2000, Bush will be re-defeated by 3 million votes.

Julian Bond

#9. If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not be married in your church, don't tell them they can't be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well a civil right, and we can't let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.

Julian Bond

#10. And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

Julian Bond

#11. I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

Julian Bond

#12. As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.

Julian Bond

#13. I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life.

Julian Bond

#14. People see America through particular lenses, either their profession, their race or their gender. So the party that speaks to our racial perceptions and offers solutions to the racial difficulties which we face is the party that's going to be rewarded with our votes.

Julian Bond

#15. Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.

Julian Bond

#16. The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

Julian Bond

#17. Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Julian Bond

#18. What we mean by integration is not to be with them (whites) but to have what they have.

Julian Bond

#19. You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.

Julian Bond

#20. Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

Julian Bond

#21. I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you'd have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn't drop out and run away.

Julian Bond

#22. Obama is to the Tea Party as the moon is to werewolves.

Julian Bond

#23. Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

Julian Bond

#24. I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.

Julian Bond

#25. The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,

Julian Bond

#26. Marriage is a civil right. If you don't want gay people to marry in your church, good for you. But you can't say they can't marry in your city.

Julian Bond

#27. Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

Julian Bond

#28. You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on.

Julian Bond

#29. The First Amendment means everything to me.

Julian Bond

#30. The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.

Julian Bond

#31. The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place.

Julian Bond

#32. There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

Julian Bond

#33. Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.

Julian Bond

#34. You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.

Julian Bond

#35. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself,

Julian Bond