Top 100 Affirmative Quotes
#1. I suppose I was dying again, so I asked the Lord of Permanent Affection for the strength to live the day. Clearly, the answer came in the affirmative."
"I didn't know there was such a Fellow," Buttercup said.
"Neither did I, in truth, but if He didn't exist, I didn't much want to either.
William Goldman
#2. No negative, all positive, affirmative. I am, God is, everything is in me. I will manifest health, purity, knowledge, whatever I want.
Swami Vivekananda
#3. Workers, black and white, need some kind of international affirmative action to protect them from unfair competition with unorganized or slave labor abroad and unfair competition with robots at home.
Jesse Jackson
#4. Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.
Harold Washington
#5. Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.
Alexander McCall Smith
#6. You're gay," wash stated.
Rhodes nodded, a short jerk of his head, dropping his gaze to his beer.
"As in, you-like-men gay."
Still eying his beer, Rhodes gave an affirmative shrug.
"As in, you like-to-fuck-men gay."
"Yes!
Katie Allen
#7. I don't want affirmative action - too much affirmative, not enough action.
Paul Mooney
#8. In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.
Jay Woodman
#9. Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.
Henry Louis Gates
#10. Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.
W. Eugene Smith
#11. The negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative
Thomas Hardy
#12. I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action.
Joe Lieberman
#13. Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.
Joe Klein
#14. You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
Athol Fugard
#15. This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice.
Cornel West
#16. The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear.
Haile Gerima
#17. In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.'
Allen West
#18. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.
Jack Kemp
#19. Everything is possible. Anything is possible at any time and at any time in life. That's such an affirmative kind of feeling.
Lillete Dubey
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard 'cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#23. At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.
George Takei
#24. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.
Saul Alinsky
#25. Humanism involves far more than the negation of supernaturalism. It requires an affirmative philosophy ... translated into a life devoted to one's own improvement and the service of all mankind.
Corliss Lamont
#26. Just your laughter will be enough to prevent the war. Your celebration, your dance, will be enough to prevent the war. Your ecstasy, your meditation, will create a tremendous force which will be far higher because it is life-affirmative.
Rajneesh
#27. 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
#29. The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.
Quentin Bryce
#30. There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, "yes," in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.
Saul Williams
#31. I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#32. If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?
Jayson Blair
#33. My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me - when my family was working-class, and we were struggling.
Richard Rodriguez
#34. Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.
Jim Webb
#35. The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.
James G. Frazer
#36. Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.
Garry Kasparov
#37. I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.
Dick Gephardt
#38. There's a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we've arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.
Spike Lee
#39. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.
Gloria Steinem
#40. For those few of you who never heard of 'The Secret,' it's a worldwide best selling book touting the benefits of positive and affirmative thinking, and sending good energy out into the world.
Jenna Morasca
#41. Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives
George Lakoff
#42. The worst thing about affirmative action is that it encourages reverse discrimination, so-called because it goes in the opposite way of how we naturally discriminate.
Stephen Colbert
#43. Affirmative action benefits NO ONE. It discriminates against Asian American and White students, while promoting negative stereotypes about the competency of African American students -- that they only got in because of their race, not merit.
Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam
#44. You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.
Sonia Sotomayor
#45. Seeing and recognizing no opposite to itself, it finds no need of denial, indeed, this thought need not enter the mind; if we are working with the Spirit we need not deny but state the affirmative attitude of mind, realizing that we are dealing with the only power that exists.
Ernest Holmes
#46. What indeed is there to say? To be or not to be married, that was the question, and they had decided it in the affirmative.
E. M. Forster
#47. I'm always excited when I make it on anyone's list - even if it's for affirmative action. My attitude is, 'Am I the token woman on this list? Because I'll take it.'
Julie Klausner
#48. Though it's impossible for us to legislate one's thoughts and feelings, we still need things like affirmative action in place because without measures like it, people in charge would not have, sadly, enough impetus to do, as cliched as it sounds, the right thing.
Jonathan Coleman
#49. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.
Sonia Sotomayor
#50. Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.
Christopher Hitchens
#51. There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.
Ruth J. Simmons
#52. It has been proven now scientifically that, an affirmative thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.
Michael Beckwith
#53. If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it.
George W. Bush
#54. Along with my spiritual practices of meditation, affirmative prayer, and visioning, what catalyzes my sense of aliveness is putting those practices into action by being of service to others.
Michael Beckwith
#55. In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.
Albert Schweitzer
#56. In the name of anti-discrimination those who uphold moral values are discriminated against while those who violate such values receive affirmative action.
Robert A. J. Gagnon
#57. Republicans can be a funny bunch. They're against affirmative action, but they always seem to be able to find people of color to fill a slot just when they're most needed.
John Ridley
#58. My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
J. C. Watts
#59. Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.
J. C. Watts
#60. I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
Camille Paglia
#61. Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement
Michelle Alexander
#62. Your actions are living affirmations of what you say you believe and feel. 'Affirmative action' is when your actions are in congruence with your beliefs & feelings. You're doing it to make YOU welcome.
Derek Rydall
#63. Through the art of affirmative prayer the limitless resources of the Spirit are at my command. The power of the Infinite is at my disposal.
Ernest Holmes
#65. I ended Affirmative Action by executive order and replaced it with a leadership model that created more opportunities for African-American and Hispanic students.
Jeb Bush
#66. I believe that Harvard can have, and must have, a strong affirmative action program that reflects our commitment to equal opportunity while fully respecting the academic standards of the University.
Derek Bok
#67. Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.
Alan Keyes
#68. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.
Thomas Hardy
#69. 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
#70. Remember that God, during your prayers, is watching for your affirmative answer to the question which He is inwardly asking you: 'Do you believe I am able to do this?' To which question you must from the depth of your heart reply, 'Yes, Lord'
John Of Kronstadt
#71. Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.
John Kasich
#72. [I] can't actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease. Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices. The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin [..] When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?
Eric Holder
#73. Courage, in the final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.
Kurt Goldstein
#74. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench - Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And
Tony Kushner
#75. A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.
Richard Lamm
#76. Biggest affirmative argument I know in favor of 'If a man die, shall he live again?' is just the way you feel inside you that nothin' can stop you from livin' on.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
#77. I was painting her portrait in the little studio, and when I came to the eyes I stopped, overcome by emotion, and said to her, 'Have you understood me?' She nodded affirmatively. 'Will you be my wife?' I asked. She made the same affirmative sign.
Jules Breton
#78. W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.
Chris Hedges
#79. It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.
Douglas Brinkley
#80. [On affirmative action:] Universities give a boost in admissions for other factors besides race, factors that bring no social benefit, such as athletic ability, celebrity of parents, and alumni connections. It is remarkable how little agitation there is against those practices.
Barbara Bergmann
#81. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
Peggy McIntosh
#82. Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
Cornel West
#83. I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
Sonia Sotomayor
#84. I think Bush has capitulated on affirmative action and government spending. Apart from that, he's OK, I guess. About the same as Howard Dean.
Peter Brimelow
#85. Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.
Susan Estrich
#86. Those in blue suits who use thinly veiled race symbols
when they say welfare and crime and three strikes and anti- affirmative action
they are sending messages more profound their language.
Jesse Jackson
#87. What is Kanye West's message? Like most rap, "I am the greatest person ever and you're not." I used to call it affirmative action for the ego.
Bill Maher
#88. I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.
Quentin Bryce
#89. Trying to get stuff straight right at the end when you never cared all through your life. Trying to get into heaven on the affirmative action plan.
Leonard Pitts Jr.
#90. What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government.
Harold Washington
#91. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is that, white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.
G.K. Chesterton
#92. In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.
Eric Liu
#93. Was anyone unclothed?" Mr. Kent said sarcastically, clearly not expecting an affirmative answer.
However.
"A bit," my uncooperative mouth responded and I tried to cover it with a yelp. This was absurd. Both of them were absurd, tonight was absurd, and I was, assuredly, absurd.
Tarun Shanker
#94. If we are prepared to invest the necessary time and effort, affirmative action can contribute to Harvard's quality and not detract from it.
Derek Bok
#95. Inside my head / or in a distant / Galaxy / Soft I hear it / Calling me." from the song "In the Blackness" in the poetry collection "Terra Affirmative".
Jay Woodman
#96. We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more.
Barack Obama
#97. There will be a debate on Firing Line between Buckley and Gore Vidal on the proposition: "This nation cannot survive as long as the income of 50 percent of the population is below the median." Mr. Vidal will take the affirmative.
M. Stanton Evans
#98. When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.
Sonia Sotomayor
#99. I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some.
Chaka Fattah
#100. I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I've changed my mind. And I've publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.
Alan Dershowitz
