Lynchings Quotes

#1. The racial divides in the United States will not be overcome until lynchings of all kinds are as painful to nonblacks as they are to blacks, until each of us become guardians of the sufferings history has bequeathed us.

Julius Lester

#2. The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.

Bryan Stevenson

#3. The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.

John Shelby Spong

#4. I mean it used to be, there was a time ... when lynchings of African Americans were not that incredibly rare. Now the lynchings are the police and it's just an outrage.

Ben Stein

#5. Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.

Ida B. Wells

#6. At this point the judge took over the questioning. "Didn't lynchings happen in Mississippi?" he asked. Yes, admitted the rating committee member, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now? "It is a history book, isn't it?" asked the judge.

James W. Loewen

#7. From 1882 to 1930, Florida recorded more lynchings of black people (266) than any other state, and from 1900 to 1930, a per capita lynching rate twice that of Mississippi, Georgia, or Louisiana.

Gilbert King

#8. The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future.

Helen Keller

#9. If Black people had simply accepted a status of economic and political inferiority, the mob murders would probably have subsided. But because vast numbers of ex-slaves refused to discard their dreams of progress, more than ten thousand lynchings occurred during the three decades following the war.

Angela Y. Davis

#10. After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance.

Gilbert King

#11. Intolerance is a thing that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings, and makes people cruel to little children and each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror, and heart and soul breaking of the world.

Betty Smith

#12. America don't have no future! America's going to be destroyed! Allah's going to divinely chastise America! Violence, crimes, earthquakes- there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. America's going to pay for all its lynchings and killings of slaves and what it's done to black people.

Muhammad Ali

#13. All of the American's foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.

H.L. Mencken

#14. I know an excuse when I hear one. Don't you dare deceive yourself into believing that you're the victim, Derek Novak.

Bella Forrest

#15. I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.

Catherine Brady

#16. Many of us squander precious natural resources -time, creative energy, emotion- comparing our talents to those of others. Today ask Spirit to call forth your authentic gifts, so that you might know them, acknowledge them, and own them.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

#17. Skepticism is a religion very rich in evangelists but very short on saviors.

Robert Breault

#18. The sight of a cross on fire should be unsettling to any true Christian. To a Negro it is worse. A unique kind of fear enters your mind, one perfected by the South: that you could die for the most harmless of offenses. You could die just for the crime of living.

Rashad Harrison

#19. Lend me your ear, while I call you a fool.

Jethro Tull

#20. Everybody out there watches the show and has expectations of wanting to be an 'Idol', but we're going to teach them how much hard work goes into it.

Bo Bice

#21. A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#22. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#23. My bravery however was the effect of assurance for could I have believed the current report, I should have fled as fast as any man, no man can possibly have a greater reluctance to an intimacy with Sir William Howe than my Self.

Henry Laurens

#24. They do not understand Islam, and I think that is one area where perhaps I hope one day I will play a role in actually making people understand what we perceive Islam to be.

Imran Khan

#25. Bullying is beneath alphas. Bullies are just pussies that are big enough to get away with exorcising their emotional problems.

A.D. Aliwat