Top 100 Sharpton's Quotes
#1. If you remove Al Sharpton's blackness, he disappears. He's transparent. There's nothing there because he bases his whole life on his blackness. Me, I'm a black man; but my blackness has submission to my Christianity.
Ken Hutcherson
#3. I opened the door of the Mercedes and got in. Man, that smell. It's leather, but not just leather. You know how, in Monopoly, there's a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card? When you're rich enough to afford a car that smells like Mr. Sharpton's gray Mercedes, you must have a Get-Out-of-Everything-Free card.
Stephen King
#4. Throughout my years championing for civil rights, analyzing politics and advocating on behalf of the voiceless, I am disturbed the most when harmless children suffer because of politics or detrimental policies.
Al Sharpton
#5. Civilians are arrested every single day - including innocent ones - and they must wait until their day in court in order to argue their side of the story. Police officers must be subjected to the same rules.
Al Sharpton
#6. During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians.
Al Sharpton
#7. When we look at the situation in Ferguson, Missouri and the tragic death of Michael Brown, we are reminded of the importance of who we elect to our city councils, who sits on our local board of education committees, who we pick to represent us in Congress, in the Senate and more.
Al Sharpton
#8. I disagree with Muhammad. I'm against hate, anti-Semitism and homophobia. ... This is not a village of hate. It's a village of hope. ... Don't let midgets give us a bad name. There are still giants in Harlem giants who will stand up for our children.
Al Sharpton
#9. We have not always agreed, but I have said repeatedly and publicly many times that Al Sharpton has never counseled violence, but he gets blamed for a whole lot of that.
David Dinkins
#10. We need to make some real fundamental change from the Constitution down in this country.
Al Sharpton
#11. The Democratic Party hasn't whipped anybody into a frenzy. The assumption is that the people that are marching and protesting and standing up against this don't have enough sense to stand up for their own interests.
Al Sharpton
#12. I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag.
Al Sharpton
#13. If O.J. had been accused of killing his black wife, you would not have seen the same passion stirred up.
Al Sharpton
#14. The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.
Al Sharpton
#15. Crime is going down everywhere but in the New York City Police Department.
Al Sharpton
#16. People working at the arenas are not just depending on one or two concerts. I think it gives a symbolic boost, as well as those shows do bring down some monetary investments in the city.
Al Sharpton
#17. If a cop sees a person running out of a store with a gun he's seeing a crime. He's not seeing a person standing.
Al Sharpton
#18. People in the age of [President] Obama don't dress like they did in the age of [Lyndon] Johnson. That's for sure.
Al Sharpton
#19. Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls.
Al Sharpton
#20. Getting Democrats organized is like herding cats.
Al Sharpton
#21. We are engaged in immediate conversations with the White House on deliberations over a successor whom we hope will continue in the general direction of Attorney General Holder.
Al Sharpton
#22. White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.
Al Sharpton
#23. I have the right to express myself. Once we get through expressing, do we really move forward in society.
Al Sharpton
#24. So (if) some cracker come and tell you 'Well, my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,' you better hold your pocket. That ain't nothing to be proud of. That means their forefathers was crooks.
Al Sharpton
#25. The boxing world is full of all kinds of corruption.
Al Sharpton
#26. As a kid who grew up chubby, I just marveled at the fact that I could be thin.
Al Sharpton
#27. In Staten Island, when you have video showing the alleged chokehold used on Eric Garner, why not go to trial and have the officer(s) explain the tape, and then this jury can determine guilt or innocence? The tape should guarantee that there should be a trial.
Al Sharpton
#28. I've seen too much in life to give up.
Al Sharpton
#29. My ministry's always been one of social activism. I think a responsible minister must be at some levels involved in the social order.
Al Sharpton
#30. Who defines terrorists? Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend.
Al Sharpton
#31. My organization, National Action Network (NAN), was on the ground talking and meeting with people in Ferguson, just as we did in Staten Island following Eric Garner's death.
Al Sharpton
#32. What's wrong with denouncing white interlopers?
Al Sharpton
#33. From racial profiling and being pulled over just for 'driving while black' to this new phenomenon of killing unarmed people out of some preconceived idea of fear, our lives and our children's lives are not being valued.
Al Sharpton
#34. We blacks had problems in the '60s and we solved them by marching. We've still got problems - let's march.
Al Sharpton
#35. One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself.
Al Sharpton
#36. I always beat the sun up in the morning. It's the secret to why I'm double trouble.
Al Sharpton
#37. Following Michael Brown's death, I went to Ferguson and met with his parents. I stood with them as they tried to hold their heads high and deal with both their immense loss and the larger issues of police-community relations.
Al Sharpton
#38. My ordination in the Church of God in Christ was at age 9, and I later became a Baptist minister, which I am today.
Al Sharpton
#39. I've learned how to measure what I say. Al Sharpton in 1986 was trying to be heard. I was a local guy and was like, 'Y'all are ignoring us.'
Al Sharpton
#40. National Action Network, the group I founded, has affiliates or chapters in over 40 cities around the country.
Al Sharpton
#41. It is time to bring down the volume and bring up the program.
Al Sharpton
#42. All women, regardless of her economic status or racial background, have a right to vote, and no politician or regressive law should prevent her from doing so.
Al Sharpton
#43. Like myself, President Obama is the father of two daughters. He understands the obstacles that they face as women, but he also understands the emergency of the state of young black men in America.
Al Sharpton
#44. Not graduating high school on time leads to fewer chances of attending college and obtaining good paying jobs, and creates instead higher chances of incarceration and unemployment.
Al Sharpton
#45. James Brown lives, as long as someone steps out of their body and dances uncontrollably.
Al Sharpton
#46. I can call a march, and thousands come out, and I happen to have access to the White House at the same time.
Al Sharpton
#47. In order to establish peace, you must have fair justice for everyone.
Al Sharpton
#48. If only Al Sharpton were around, Lincoln would have known he was a victim of racism.
Ann Coulter
#49. I've seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.
Al Sharpton
#50. I'm never going to be fat - never again. I'm going to make it easy on my pallbearers.
Al Sharpton
#51. Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance.
Al Sharpton
#52. While the rest of the country waves the flag of Americana, we understand we are not part of that. We don't owe America anything - America owes us.
Al Sharpton
#53. In the world of celebrity, there is one universal law: if there's a scandal or death, Al Sharpton will be there.
Shawn Amos
#54. When you're dealing with boycotts, you don't need everyone. You just need enough to be effective.
Al Sharpton
#55. I actually lost more weight than I am!
Al Sharpton
#56. We cannot reform institutional racism or systemic policies if we are not actively engaged. It's not enough to simply complain about injustice; the only way to prevent future injustice is to create the society we would like to see, one where we are all equal under the law.
Al Sharpton
#57. This is not about what party you're part of. This is about right and wrong, ... the conscience of this nation.
Al Sharpton
#58. I cannot imagine where we would have been without BET. Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows.
Al Sharpton
#59. President Obama telling Americans not to panic in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
Al Sharpton
#60. I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.
Al Sharpton
#61. I've gone from, you know, being too close to politicians, to being too close to entertainers, and people's father that I'm not.
Al Sharpton
#62. We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.
Al Sharpton
#63. The United States government has the obligation to educate all young people in this country.
Al Sharpton
#64. If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.
Michael Eric Dyson
#65. Giving someone their style or bumping up their sense of style to be a better version of what it is, is part of the fun of what I do, and I actually approached Al Sharpton. They didn't come to me.
Carol Friedman
#66. In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.
Al Sharpton
#68. I can't see how an unarmed man rejecting a drug deal ended up dead.
Al Sharpton
#69. I've never seen an effective boycott that didn't work.
Al Sharpton
#70. I haven't done the things I've done to be in a sitcom.
Al Sharpton
#71. We're not anti-police ... we're anti-police brutality.
Al Sharpton
#72. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.
John McCain
#73. I've never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known.
Al Sharpton
#74. But resist we much. We must, and we will much- about that- be committed.
Al Sharpton
#75. I could take all the cartoons in the tabloid newspapers, but I couldn't take my daughter punching me in the belly and asking why I was so fat. That was my inspiration to lose the weight. And probably the last time anyone hurt my feelings.
Al Sharpton
#76. Even when I did my Broadway show, I did 15 minutes no one had seen before, because that was the night that Michael Jackson protested about Al Sharpton bailing on him. I said, "Wow, if that man bails on you, this must be really a lost cause."
Robin Williams
#77. You can't get a solution if you won't talk to the people that have the problem. You can't ever have healing if the patient is left out of the operation room.
Al Sharpton
#78. When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.
Al Sharpton
#79. The United States has got to adopt a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world.
Al Sharpton
#80. Either we need to redefine what probable cause means and say that police are not subject to it, or we arrest officers right away just as we would with any other person accused of committing a crime. Either we write new laws or enforce existing ones; we cannot have it both ways.
Al Sharpton
#81. I've been able to reach from the streets to the suites.
Al Sharpton
#82. It was better walk with dignity than ride in shame. A lot of people in Cincinnati are saying, "Rather than have the continual problems of police brutality and economic disparity, I'm willing to make some sacrifices." And I think that they ought to be respected for doing that.
Al Sharpton
#83. As a Baptist minister, I don't have the right to impose my views on anyone else. If committed gay and lesbian couples want to marry, that is their business; none of us should stand in their way
Al Sharpton
#84. Somebody had to bring the truth to the doorstep of this president.
Al Sharpton
#85. Let me be clear: as I have said repeatedly, I do not believe that all police officers are bad, nor do I believe that most are bad. But there must be a transparent, impartial and fair system to judge those that engage in criminal or unethical acts.
Al Sharpton
#86. They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It's absurd.
Al Sharpton
#87. In New York, you are competing with Times Square lights and all of that, so you've got to be 300 pounds and crazy to get anyone's attention. Then, you can refine yourself. I always knew under those 300 pounds and tracksuits was a refined, slim, dignified man.
Al Sharpton
#88. In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
Al Sharpton
#89. If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way of your own cause.
Al Sharpton
#90. If you can get the proper definition of trouble, then we can find out who the real troublemakers are.
Al Sharpton
#91. The right wing always mobilizes around constitutional amendments: the right to bear arms, school prayer.
Al Sharpton
#92. If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicize a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey ... then I should be praised for it, and it's more of a comment on them than me that it would take tricks to make them cover the loss of life.
Al Sharpton
#93. Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.
Al Sharpton
#94. When the culture of police departments is sometimes infused with bias or preconceived ideas against certain groups, there needs to be reform and retraining throughout. And unfortunately, we cannot rely on local departments to police themselves; we need intervention from the top.
Al Sharpton
#95. As a preacher who has spent significant time in churches and houses of worship all across the country, I can tell you firsthand that religious liberty and freedom are principles that can never be infringed upon.
Al Sharpton
#96. I think drugs affect poor people and people of color more than anyone.
Al Sharpton
#97. I would be psyched to get a phone call from Al Sharpton. I need to find out who does his hair. It's beautiful. It's a gorgeous mane.
Nick Kroll
#98. It is up to us to change laws on the books like 'Stand Your Ground' laws and push elected officials to enact regulations that hold police officers to the same standards as the rest of society. This is why we vote.
Al Sharpton
#99. If it weren't for the mentorship and guidance from people like my mother, James Brown and others, I wouldn't have been able to make something of my life.
Al Sharpton
#100. I'm a patriot in the truest sense of the word.
Al Sharpton
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