Quotes About Affirmative Action

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. I don't want affirmative action - too much affirmative, not enough action.

Paul Mooney

#4. 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

#5. I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action.

Joe Lieberman

#6. Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

Joe Klein

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

Jack Kemp

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I am an affirmative action hire.

Anna Quindlen

#16. 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

#17. If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?

Jayson Blair

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives

George Lakoff

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.

Sonia Sotomayor

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it.

George W. Bush

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

Harold Washington

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. [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

#47. 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

#48. A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.

Richard Lamm

#49. W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich.

Chris Hedges

#50. 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

#51. [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

#52. 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

#53. Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.

Cornel West

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

Susan Estrich

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

Quentin Bryce

#60. 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.

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.

Sonia Sotomayor

#66. I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some.

Chaka Fattah

#67. 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

#68. Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

Andrew Young

#69. I don't know how one would define an affirmative-action hire. I ultimately do not know what role race played in my hiring.

Jayson Blair

#70. That is one of the reasons I oppose this whole Affirmative Action business. We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve.

Alan Keyes

#71. I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188

Sonia Sotomayor

#72. If we conservatives "of color" refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of "selling out.

Michelle Malkin

#73. When I was a young filmmaker starting out, I was really snobby about all the affirmative action for women filmmakers because I felt it should be about your talent, and I made a film that won awards, and people wanted me.

Gillian Armstrong

#74. And, even if Affirmative Action survives, it is also clear that these policies are not themselves sufficient to close the educational and employment gaps that plague U.S. minorities.

Harry J. Holzer

#75. When one demands equal rights for women, one needs to assess in which areas women can work better than men, in which they can work like men, and in which they need protection and affirmative action for when they cannot work like men.

Pervez Musharraf

#76. So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest

Clarence Thomas

#77. And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

James Earl Jones

#78. I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

Randall Kennedy

#79. [A]ffirmative action in the United States has made blacks ... who have largely lifted themselves out of poverty, look like people who owe their rise to affirmative action and other government programs.

Thomas Sowell

#80. The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

Randall Kennedy

#81. You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action.

J. C. Watts

#82. Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Andrew Young

#83. I want to make one thing clear: I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-affirmative action, I'm pro- environment, pro-health care, and pro-labor. And if that ain't a Democrat, then I must be at the wrong meeting.

Wesley Clark

#84. There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.

Gloria Steinem

#85. If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

Maynard Jackson

#86. I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.

Gloria Steinem

#87. Some would argue that the president himself benefited from a form of affirmative action because as a C student, he only got into Yale because his father was a wealthy alumnus. But the White House counters that Saddam is a menace and must be stopped.

Jon Stewart

#88. You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Russell Simmons

#89. South Africa is the only country where an overwhelming majority in complete political control is apparently so threatened by a tiny minority that they need racist affirmative action policies to protect the majority by legislatively excluding the minority totally from the job market.

Christina Engela

#90. I'm pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment and pro-labor. I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America or I was going to be a happy Democrat.

Wesley Clark

#91. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.

Ron Paul

#92. White men in North America are the beneficiaries of the single biggest affirmative action program in world history. It's called world history.

Michael Kimmel

#93. I'm not one that believes that affirmative action should be based on one's skin color or one's gender, I think it should be done based on one's need, because I think if you are from a poor white community, I think that poor white kid needs a scholarship just as badly as a poor black kid.

J. C. Watts

#94. Old white guys can be a funny bunch, can't they? The same anti-same-sex marriage, anti-affirmative action cadre can flower into the biggest supporters of 'equality' the minute they get a whiff of minority empowerment.

John Ridley

#95. And affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships, and college admittance.

David Duke

#96. And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success." A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse,

William Zinsser

#97. I think there are some things ... that may even be distorted in the practice, such as some affirmative action programs becoming quota systems. And I'm old enough to remember when quotas existed in the United States for the purpose of discrimination, and I don't want to see that happen again.

Ronald Reagan

#98. In those days [1955], affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys.

Bill Moyers

#99. Due to affirmative action, about half of the black law students fall to the bottom 10% percent of the class and they are 2.5 times more likely than whites not to graduate college. Blacks are four times less likely to pass the bar exam on the first attempt.

Peter Kirsanow

#100. Blacks who have not succumbed to the victim culture have been, are, and will be doing quite well - all on their own, without handouts, affirmative action, and other patronizing measures.

Tammy Bruce