Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by Jesse Jackson - Page 4

No one wants to see self-destructive riots because there's no future in riots.

You cannot teach what you don't know. You cannot give energy if you're not on fire on the inside.

Each time a barrier falls for one person, the doors of opportunity open wider for every other American.

We went across the South on Super Tuesday without a single catcall or boo, without a single ugly sign. Not until we got to New York and the North did the litmus test of race and religion spout from the mouths of public officials.

Let nothing and nobody break your spirit. Let the unity in the community remain intact.

You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.

The crisis is not an opportunity to change the character of Louisiana's political order. We must not use the crisis to turn Louisiana into a red state -- this is a rainbow state.

The solution [to a crisis pregnancy] is not to kill the innocent baby but to deal with the mother's values and her attitudes toward life.

We must know the difference between sweat and tears. Sweat is wet. Tears are wet. Sweat is salty. Tears are salty. But progress comes through sweat. Progress never came through tears.

Our premise is that inclusion leads to growth. So for those who are locked out, they lose development, and those who are in power lose market and growth.

If the right wing has their way and state's rights control voting rights, they would remove protections that make it difficult for seniors to vote. It would be harder for students to vote on campus. These are attempts to suppress acts of voting.

Just because a chicken was born in the oven doesn't make it a biscuit.

I must oppose the use of federal funds for a policy of killing infants.

Choose the human race over the nuclear race. Bury the weapons and don't burn the people.

The Black public sector middle class teachers, policeman, firemen, and post office workers, those jobs have been on the decline but there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the private sector. What is especially painful is government policy bailed out the banks without making them make reinvestments for rebuilding. The result is 53-million Americans are food insecure, 50-million Americans are in poverty, 44 million are on food stamps, 26 million are looking for a job.

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people... There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view... That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.

I'm a Third World person. I grew up in an occupied zone [Greenville, South Carolina] and had to negotiate with the superpower, really the colonial power.

A new leadership. A choice. A chance. Don't cry about what you don't have. Use what you got.

Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master.

It'll be a great day when the seniors have all the baseball caps they need and the Pentagon bombs Gilligan's Island.

Abortion is black genocide...What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?

When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.

If I can make it, you can make it.

Inclusion is not a matter of political correctness. It is the key to growth.

There was a direct jobs program from the Rooselvelt administration in the 1930s. The Justice Department has set up a task force to investigate the banks and the mortgage crisis but that's a little too late. Whenever they report they will report the obvious. It will be too late to impact the people who need the help the most.

I was blessed to go abroad and bring Americans home from jail in Syria, and Iraq, and Cuba, and Yugoslavia, and Liberia, those are high moments of my life.

Our dreams must be stronger than our memories.

We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got north to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan, and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history.

Nobody will save us from us but us.

Capitalism without capital is just an ism.

The white Christian church never raised to the heights of Christ. It stayed within the limit of culture.

In order for an ideal to become a reality, there must be a person, a personality to translate it.

Surrender had played out for good with me.

How can you have in our country that is based upon liberality and liberation, be so anti-liberal. That's toxic waste to our consciousness. It's hard to be an American conservative because that's a contradiction in terms. Now if you take away freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of protest, and lock people out based upon their race, their language and their religion, that's conservative and fascist. America is a liberal idea.

The ground is no place for a champion. The ground is no place that I will wallow on.

Our flag is read, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbown-red, yellow, brown, black and white - and we're all precious in God's sight.

I've paid my dues. I've earned your votes. Send me.

I preach nonviolence because it's the better alternative.

[I]t's an honor to be a food stamp president. Food stamps feed the hungry. Food stamps save the children. Food stamps help the farmer. Food stamps help the truck driver. Food stamps help the warehouse. Food stamps help the store. Food stamps hire people and feed people. Food stamps save people from starvation and malnutrition. ... Give President Barack Obama a big hand. Show your love. Show your appreciation.

Pictures can live in one's memory. That's why they are important.

The law protects you from being abused. It doesn’t threaten your lifestyle for someone else to have the right to exhibit their lifestyle.

When it came to the division of power, we did not get from the Jews the slice of cake we deserved... the Jews do not share with us control of wealth, broadcasting stations and other centers of power.

If I were a white candidate, I'd have won the Democratic nomination.

The wiping out of millions of homes took away Black and Brown wealth. It drove poverty, it drove unemployment, it drove people to food stamps.

When I was a boy we were poor and we had to make do with what we had. So my grandma used to make us quits that we used for blankets. She couldn't afford to go to the store and buy a blanket -- so she'd take scraps of cloth and sew them together. there'd be different colors and different patterns and different types of cloth -- but they all went together to make that big quilt to keep us warm.

You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and unwinnable.

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.

On the political front, of course it's a zero-sum game. If it's all white males holding positions, you bring 10 women in, then it's, 'Women are coming!' Get 10 blacks and it's, 'Blacks are coming!' 'Hispanics are coming!' Zero-sum game. The seatmates might change but the chairs don't move. In the economy, the number of chairs can actually increase.

America is not like a blanket- one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt- many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread.

Gangs are a group reaction to helplessness.

When blacks are unemployed, they are considered lazy and apathetic. When whites are unemployed, it's considered a depression.

What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have twenty years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth.

I want to cut his nuts off.

We’ve been so preoccupied with getting the government to behave in a fair and democratic way, we were not able to focus on the private sector where most of the jobs are, where most of the wealth and opportunities are.

If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.

What we have to be judged by is the work we try to do. It's public service, not perfect service.

His [Donald Trump] urban policy is stop and frisk, law and order. And we need investment and development.

Hymies." And "Hymietown.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

I do not deny the allegation, I deny the allegator.