Race And Class Quotes

#1. Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.

Condoleezza Rice

#2. The thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.

Rashid Johnson

#3. It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons,

Ben Shapiro

#4. Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.

Marian Wright Edelman

#5. ...that society with its hurtful views on race and class distinction would make it difficult for us to succeed.

Curtis W. Jackson

#6. Look, I want what's good for everybody. I want to promote good state education for all. I want to raise standards for all kids, irrespective of race and class but why can't they all just do what I say when I know I'm right?

Arabella Weir

#7. Race and class were a kind of destiny; very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him.

Damon Galgut

#8. Within the gendered institution of prostitution, race and class create a hierarchy with indigenous women at its lowest point.

Melissa Farley

#9. Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid.

Lynda Barry

#10. If you can't have a good time and smile and relate to people across race and class, then the success that you have ultimately is just sounding brass and tinkling symbol.

Cornel West

#11. Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.

Majora Carter

#12. The government's drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.

Piper Kerman

#13. Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.

Judith Butler

#14. Am I a hypocrite?" I ask. "You're a black girl who fell in love with a white boy." "And a black girl who cares about race and class issues." Nikki leans back in the chair. "You can be both.

Renee Watson

#15. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#16. We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

Henry Louis Gates

#17. People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

Jose Padilha

#18. To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

Gloria Steinem

#19. I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.

Theaster Gates

#20. Teens' use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey's Analysis of a Teenager's View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

Danah Boyd

#21. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#22. If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#23. I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#24. Some have a difficult time with feminism. 'Why not a human liberation movement?' they say. The answer is that the power differences between the sexes, races, and classes are still so extreme that invoking humanism, at this time, dangerously denies that fact.

Loraine Hutchins

#25. I think the president can set a tone and say we're not divided by gender, age, race. We're all Americans and want the same things. We want the best things for our kids. We want the rules to be fair. If they work hard, get a great education, they should be able to join the middle class.

Bobby Jindal

#26. The current transgender movement is composed of a great number of factions, divided by those old favorites of class, race, age, language, region, and nationality.

Kate Bornstein

#27. A good mother does not live only for her children. She always has some bond with other mothers, no matter what class, nationality or race they may be. All mothers have the same joys, the same sorrows, the same anxieties. All mothers think first of their child and of children.

Werenfried Von Straaten

#28. Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.

Bell Hooks

#29. A liberal education ... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.

Robert M. Hutchins

#30. The whole of mankind is one and only one, one race, one class and one society.

Maria Montessori

#31. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group - whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good'

Ayn Rand

#32. This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

Paul Robeson

#33. We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.

Joseph O'Connor

#34. My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

Sidney Poitier

#35. We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

Margaret Mead

#36. I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

James Hillman

#37. All I know for sure is that issues like race, like class, are always best approached with compassion and open-mindedness.

Ezra Koenig

#38. Then he spoke of James Joyce. He told about Joyce's family, his religion, his education, his writing. He spoke of a book called Dubliners and a story in the book titled "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." Regardless of race, regardless of class, that story was universal, he said.

Ernest J. Gaines

#39. What's doubly, possibly triply weird about the [Donald] Trump claim is that I said something really hateful and offended an entire class of people, and in a case that actually has nothing to do with race he should still be conflicted out.

Dahlia Lithwick

#40. The tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in history; class and race and color ceasing altogether to be barriers.

Marmaduke Pickthall

#41. U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

#42. It's probably the toughest distance race in the world to win. World class runners from 1500m to the marathon contest it and instead of just three runners from each country, like in the Olympics or World Championships, in the senior men's race there are nine.

Paul Tergat

#43. Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.

Achille Mbembe

#44. In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds - class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don't merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#45. Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

Elizabeth Janeway

#46. Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

Karl Marx

#47. Us as a people, we can't do it on our own. We have to understand that we're not each other's enemy. We have to stop discriminating against each other due to class and due to race and due to location or financial position.

Kanye West

#48. All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don't challenge ourselves to actually practice.

Bell Hooks

#49. Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#50. A friend to me has no race, no class and belongs to no minority. My friendships were formed out of affection, mutual respect and a feeling of having something strong in common. These are eternal values that cannot be racially classified. This is the way I look at race.

Frank Sinatra

#51. Human race don't go extinct but only if we treat each other as a human regardless of gender, color, class, and ethnicity.

Mohith Agadi

#52. History and the task of the future no longer signify the struggle of class against class or the conflict between one church dogma and another, but the settlement between blood and blood, race and race, Folk and Folk. And that means: the struggle of spiritual values against each other.

Alfred Rosenberg

#53. All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.

Kate Sheppard

#54. The capitalist class is interested in keeping the workingmen divided among themselves. Hence it foments race and religious animosities that come down from the past.

Daniel De Leon

#55. What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

Will Self

#56. I would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.

Gloria Steinem

#57. The race struggle is the primal one, and the class struggle secondary. The last dominating race is the German.

Moses Hess

#58. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Will Self

#59. I will be asking my network to lead a discussion on the issues of class, race, energy, the environment, disaster planning, Iraq
all those things and more. This encompasses so many of the major issues of our time.

Brian Williams

#60. We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.

Thomas Ligotti

#61. It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.

Carter G. Woodson

#62. The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.

Ed Smith

#63. The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

Adrienne Rich

#64. The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.

H.L. Mencken

#65. The time will come when we ourselves are disliked or misunderstood, or strangers, different from our judges in race or class or creed, and if their sense of justice depends upon their passion rather than their morality, who is to speak for us then, or defend our right to the truth?

Anne Perry

#66. It's literature that provides solace to hearts wounded by man made divisions of religion, race, class, gender and class...

Neelam Saxena Chandra

#67. Coming out involves varying degrees of difficulty that are affected by class, race, religion, and geography.

Lance Loud

#68. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

Cornel West

#69. I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

Rita Dove

#70. And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

Ralph Bunche

#71. Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.

Madame De Stael

#72. NAZISM = "National Socialism"
BOLSHEVISM = "International Socialism"
One was collectivism based on economic class, the other collectivism based on race and ethnicity. They agreed on the socialist part, but disagreed on participants.

A.E. Samaan

#73. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#74. It is a big deal to work with people who are different from you. And if you're white or of a higher class,no matter what race you are, you'll probably mess up. Maybe get yelled at. But there are worse things. Like keeping your dignity safe at home, while the world goes to hell.

Kelly J. Cogswell

#75. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Toni Morrison

#76. without having to consider to what class they belonged. They all belonged to human race which without his thinking about it, all appeared
dear to Olenin and they all treated him in a friendly manner way.

Leo Tolstoy

#77. We need to make fun of and ridicule the media images that seek to keep us down, divide us against each other by age, class, and race, and insist that we spend so much psychic energy on our faces, clothes and bodies that nothing is left for ideas, social change, or politics.

Susan Douglas

#78. I don't think we should stop emphasizing race because I think, you know, race is still very, very important, and we have to recognize that and continue to introduce programs to address racial inequities. But we have to widen our vision and also address the growing problems of economic class.

William Julius Wilson

#79. Both class and race survive education, and neither should. What is education then? If it doesn't help a human being to recognize that humanity is humanity, what is it for? So you can make a bigger salary than other people?

Beah Richards

#80. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.

Anna Julia Cooper

#81. It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Michael Eric Dyson

#82. There's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.

Jesse Jackson

#83. Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it's all about class now, the haves and the have-nots,

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#84. Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#85. Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

Samantha Trenoweth

#86. Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Dorothy Allison

#87. There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation.

Francis Galton

#88. A day of peace and sharing can lead to greater understanding and cooperation among political parties, faith groups, and people of different races and economic class.

John Conyers

#89. We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Rebecca Solnit

#90. The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed, hobbits with almost supernatural powers.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#91. As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.

H. Samy Alim

#92. Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.

Gloria Steinem

#93. Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppres the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.

Mao Tse-tung

#94. Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person's shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else.

Gloria Steinem

#95. It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry.

Gordon W. Allport

#96. Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.

Rashid Johnson

#97. Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.

Wilhelm Reich

#98. In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

Sarah Churchwell

#99. The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

C.L.R. James

#100. Ensconced, he (Roosevelt) lacked some of the neuroses of progressives-economic envy and race hatred especially.His radicalism was a matter of energy rather than urgency.

Edmund Morris