Top 48 John Howard Griffin Quotes
#2. A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called "black separatists" were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.
John Howard Griffin
#3. Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a scale that dwarfs the Negro's defaults. The
John Howard Griffin
#4. This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed.
John Howard Griffin
#5. Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty
John Howard Griffin
#6. We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it.
John Howard Griffin
#7. I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.
John Howard Griffin
#8. If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.
John Howard Griffin
#9. But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement.
John Howard Griffin
#10. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested.
John Howard Griffin
#12. When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.
John Howard Griffin
#15. He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.
John Howard Griffin
#16. If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.
John Howard Griffin
#17. In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "accident" - rather than by who he is in his humanity.
John Howard Griffin
#19. Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities of the North, the very officials who had praised him sometimes led opposition to his work locally.
John Howard Griffin
#20. A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.
John Howard Griffin
#21. In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.
John Howard Griffin
#22. I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society.
John Howard Griffin
#23. To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.
John Howard Griffin
#24. How can you render the duties of justice to men when they may destroy you?
John Howard Griffin
#29. The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The
John Howard Griffin
#30. Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group. Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover.
John Howard Griffin
#31. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights." Others
John Howard Griffin
#33. God is invoked ... and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed and at the same time disfigured and perverted.
John Howard Griffin
#34. It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.
John Howard Griffin
#35. Didn't Shakespeare say something about 'every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up'? He knew his religious bigots.
John Howard Griffin
#37. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.
John Howard Griffin
#39. He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.
John Howard Griffin
#40. We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice - and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic - we show our prejudice in our paternalism - we downgrade their dignity.
John Howard Griffin
#41. The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.
John Howard Griffin
#42. For so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man's good intentions toward his fellow man.
John Howard Griffin
#44. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.
John Howard Griffin
#45. My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. I
John Howard Griffin
#46. The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all.
John Howard Griffin
#47. A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.
John Howard Griffin
#48. All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.
John Howard Griffin
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