Top 100 White History Quotes
#1. Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.
James W. Loewen
#2. The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.
Carlos Fuentes
#3. We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#4. Now that the Harry Potter series is over, maybe the truth can be realized: This has been the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises.
Armond White
#5. We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
Adrienne Rich
#6. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
Clement Alexander Price
#7. I have always thought that if I could turn back the pages of history and photograph one man, my choice would be Moses.
Margaret Bourke-White
#8. In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history ... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.
Studs Terkel
#9. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
#10. The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.
Helen Thomas
#11. I don't think that other races are inferior, I just think that there's something special about white people. Sometimes, when I think about all the things white people have accomplished throughout history, I smile, and I nod, and I think to myself, 'Yeah, I'm glad I'm on that team.'
Zach Braff
#12. I think the ethical standards established in this White House have been the highest in the history of the White House.
Al Gore
#13. Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#14. You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.
Rusty Schweickart
#15. We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.
Ellen G. White
#16. A man who tosses worms in the river isn't 't necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm's got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.
Malcolm X
#17. The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
Gilbert White
#18. Being broken isn't the worst thing. We can be mended and put together again. We don't have to be ashamed of our past. We can embrace the history that gives us value, and see our cracks as beautiful.
Anna White
#19. Every nation is part of the history we inherit, blacks and whites, slaves and gods; we have no other option, embracing each other.
M.F. Moonzajer
#20. If the white man ain't the devil, he's been aiming at the history of the Americans.
Muhammad Ali
#21. I'm saying this as a Republican: In the White House, the effort that goes in and wherever these decisions are made, as to limit civilian casualties, is more probably than any in the history of the world, especially when you consider the history of warfare.
Peter T. King
#22. If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.
George Edward Woodberry
#23. Paul Konerko is one of the greatest players in White Sox history, not only for his strength and performance on the field, but also for his heart and leadership off the field.
Jerry Reinsdorf
#24. The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism - the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#25. Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.
Darryl Pinckney
#26. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
Malcolm X
#27. History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
Theodore White
#28. If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together.
Theodore White
#29. Any one war seems rooted in its antecedents.
T.H. White
#30. The history of pop is a progression of underground styles going mainstream, so there's nothing unusual about the White Stripes or Franz Ferdinand selling records.
Sasha Frere-Jones
#31. Maybe it was the way of the South to welcome home wayward family members who had no claim to such a piece of history except for a willingness to adopt it as their own and a shared last name.
Karen White
#32. I will lay it out in black and white, and my tale will contain more truth than the great dead histories on my father's bookshelves. For they say what happened, but not what it was like. They say what happened, but they do not say why.
Beth Underdown
#33. Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.
Malcolm X
#34. Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.
Richard White
#35. Australia has a very big history of incarceration. What does that mean to us? What does it mean that we came over to a country that's not necessarily ours and filled it with white prisoners?
Yael Stone
#36. The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
Douglas Adams
#37. At pivotal moments throughout history, there have always been grey areas, and there likely will be in the future. Courage now lies not in the black and white, as in the past, but in the grey.
Safak Pavey
#38. There's a reason I'm a history major, for chrissake - I deal in facts. Black and white. This happened at this time to this person and here's the result.
Elle Kennedy
#39. A President and his wise men can only propose; but Congress disposes. It is when President and Congress agree that American history marches forward.
Theodore White
#40. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.
Patrick White
#41. In Portugal, my sculpture 'She Changes' refers to the town's fishing history, to the era of seafaring trade and discovery. The contemporary site is industrial, surrounded by red and white striped smokestacks, which is mirrored in the pattern of the sculpture.
Janet Echelman
#42. When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.
Harry Shearer
#43. Oh, my other goal was that I wanted to talk about this area and this time in history. I wanted to talk about growing up in Oakland, a white kid, from this kind of generation of broken homes and listening to hip-hop.
Moshe Kasher
#44. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.
Moby
#45. 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
#46. The matter came up for judicial investigation, but as might have been expected, the white people concluded it was unnecessary to wait the result of the investigation - that it was preferable to hang the accused first and try him afterward.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
#47. 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
#48. I probably saved more black lives as mayor of New York City than any mayor in the history of this city. And I did it by having to use police officers in black areas where there was an astounding amount of crime. If that crime was in white areas, police officers would be in white areas.
Rudy Giuliani
#49. If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England.
Idris Elba
#50. The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#51. Bill Clinton beat Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, for the White House in 1992 by focusing on 'the economy, stupid' - and Clinton's victory led, in time, to the longest sustained boom in American history.
Nigel Hamilton
#52. I've always felt privileged to cover the White House and to have that ringside seat to history
Helen Thomas
#53. The reality is I believe there has never been in the history of our White House such an unscrupulous pair as what I witnessed in this White House.
Linda Tripp
#54. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.
Waylon Jennings
#55. I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#56. No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.
Anastasia Griffith
#57. Be careful. I wouldn't want anything to happen to the worst Spanish student in the history of the language."
I laughed. "No problemo.
Kiersten White
#58. This is really what the White House is all about. It's the "People's House." It's a place that is steeped in history, but it's also a place where everyone should feel welcome. And that's why my husband and I have made it our mission to open up the house to as many people as we can.
Michelle Obama
#59. One thing that in my reporting that I found and was amazed to find was that, as far as I could determine, neither high-level White House officials in the Bush administration nor even the top brass at the CIA even knew the history of water boarding when they approved it.
Scott Shane
#60. History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.
Sam Maggs
#61. Church history has repeatedly and clearly proven one thing: Once the highest view of Scripture is abandoned by any theologian, group, denomination, or church, the downhill slide in both its theology and practice is inevitable.
James R. White
#62. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.
Ronald C. White Jr.
#63. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.
Nancy Isenberg
#64. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn't his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn't this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?
Tara Conklin
#65. The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.
Byron White
#66. Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
#67. The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.
Colin Callender
#68. Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines.
Peter Coyote
#71. I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder.
Matt Taibbi
#72. No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
Malcolm X
#73. Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#74. I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson.
James Knowles III
#75. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#76. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#77. Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.
Edmund White
#78. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.
Malcolm X
#79. For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites ...
Cornel West
#80. Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it.
Andrew Dickson White
#81. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#82. When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.
Nicolas Cage
#83. The Oceanic White Tip is considered one of the most dangerous sharks in the sea along with the Great White and Tiger. It is responsible for some of the most famous episodes of man-eating in history, such as when the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in 1945.
Brian Skerry
#84. the only failure that cannot be excused is the failure to act on an injustice or to right a wrong. Those are the failures history shuns because the people who stand by and allow evil to occur are very nearly as bad as the evil-doers themselves." Archer
April White
#85. Why don't they go ahead and change the name of the White House to the West House. They want to do away with the heritage of White Settlement and destroy the history of White Settlement.
Alan Price
#86. The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensity the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#87. What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.
Michael Emerson
#88. We have, for generations, been trying to be more inclusive of the word Southern. And a symbol like the confederate flag indicates white only are allowed into that world. And removing the Confederate flag from public view to the pages of history is long overdue.
William R. Ferris
#89. Let us reject this decree. In matters of conscience the majority has no power.
Merle d'Aubigne, History of the Reformation, b. 13, ch. 5.
Ellen G. White
#90. For the first time in our history, the winners of the White House Turkey Pardon were chosen through a highly competitive online vote. And once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it. The guy is amazing.
Barack Obama
#91. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad on how black people have been brainwashed.How they've been taught to love white and hate black, how we've been robbed of our names in slavery.We were robbed of our culture, we were robbed of our true history. So it left us a walking dead man.
Muhammad Ali
#92. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
#93. The real history never makes the books;
April White
#94. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.
He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
Malcolm X
#95. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.
Cornel West
#96. The story of the Bible is not the story of the covenant of grace; nor is it the story of Israel. The Bible is the story of God's work in history to sum up all things in Christ. New Covenant Theology strives to keep this one plan of God - centered in Jesus Christ - primary.
A. Blake White
#97. History proves that the white man is a devil.
Malcolm X
#98. In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
Zephyr Teachout
#99. But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins's relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks - a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.
Rebecca Skloot
#100. Fun-run" indeed,what a misnomer. That'd be like saying "calm gremlin" or "pleasant hag." Or 'entertaining history textbook.
Kiersten White
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