Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Shaun King - Page 2

I became personal friends with Erica Garner and with so many other families affected by police violence.

The United States has so many laws, into the millions, that experts have lost track of just how many laws we have.

When you turn 18 in the United States, you should be automatically registered to vote. Ideally, this sensible reform would be a federal law affecting all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and American territories, but our federal government stopped being sensible a very long time ago.

'Black Panther' had a whole cast of beautiful black brilliance. Black scientists. Black presidents. The style. The technology. The color.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder of a political organization called Real Justice. Our goal is to help elect progressive, reform-minded prosecutors and district attorneys that are committed to ending mass incarceration.

Over and over again, I looked family members who had lost loved ones to police violence, I looked them right in the eye and told them, 'Don't worry. We will get justice for your family.'

Our nation is not a fully representative democracy if we do not have a one-person, one-vote method of directly electing our president. It disproportionately tilts favor to smaller states with smaller populations.

It's always important, when we experience injustice in this nation, that people in power understand that we will not take that injustice quietly.

Trump's America means many things, but this much is clear - it means toxic white masculinity is not just permitted, it's fully empowered - and getting worse.

When Trump was elected, it gave white men - particularly white men in power - full, unfettered permission to say or do whatever they want without consequence.

I grossly underestimated the gravitational pull of America's justice system toward white supremacy.

When 3 million more people vote for a presidential candidate, but that candidate still loses, the system sucks. Period. It's broken. I think it's broken if the candidate loses by one vote and still wins. Losing by 3 million votes, but still winning the election, is preposterous.

I've come to understand that awareness and momentum, while necessary and valuable, are just two of the dozens of essential ingredients required to actually make change happen.

We must put an end to the corruption and systemic racism in our justice system, and that starts by electing progressive district attorneys who will fight for real justice across the country.

Because of tax laws governing charities, including almost every single civil rights organization you've ever heard of, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the ACLU, and others, those organizations are not allowed to endorse political candidates or use their resources in political campaigns of any kind.

We live in a country where movies, music, and sports are more important than God to a lot of people. It's why Colin Kaepernick's protest rocked the nation and got the whole world talking. Taking a knee is a simple act of defiance. Had Colin done it anywhere other than the football field, it might not have even made the news.

Before I was a journalist, I was a preacher in Georgia and Kentucky.

'The Star-Spangled Banner' should've never been made into our national anthem. That President Woodrow Wilson, widely thought to be one of the most bigoted presidents ever elected, chose it as our national anthem, is painfully telling as well.

It was my long-held belief that police brutality would increase under the Trump administration.

I love New York. It's my favorite city in the world. I live and work here by choice.

Blame it on our short memories, the daily grind of the 24-hour-news cycle, or the endless barrage of information that comes at us on social media, but count me in the number of people who did not truly understand how utterly gross both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have been to women, including their own wives, across the years.

Politicians can and should be held accountable for their choices.

While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone-cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation-owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it.

'Go vote' is a not a political strategy. It's hardly a slogan. Hell, it's not even a good tweet.

Here's what I know for sure: every single vote counts. That's not just a saying.

Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world.

In the United States, we've put our elections on Tuesday. That's dumb. In modern life, it makes absolutely no sense.

I was in high school when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky. We didn't have social media back then - hell, we didn't have a computer with the Internet in our home - so the details of it all escaped me.

Much of the foundation of our criminal justice system is derived from slave patrols and was created when African Americans could still be bought, sold, and traded.

When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.

I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In a dream world, the bread is super soft, like the Wonder Bread of my childhood, and the sandwich will have crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, and a cup of cold milk to go with it.

Politicians and lawmakers are willing to watch us take us a knee, watch us march, watch us picket and protest - and wait us out. They are willing and prepared to outlast us - and, in most cases, to do absolutely nothing about the problems we highlight and amplify.

Donald Trump is a bigot.

I love social media, and it is an important part of how we make change happen. But we can't retweet ourselves out of our most serious problems.

Racism itself is difficult to measure. We can measure hate crimes - which are absolutely an indicator. We can measure reports of discrimination. We can measure the number of times hateful words are being used across the Internet. Those things all help us measure racism, but it can sometimes be nebulous.

I've had some unbelievable successes, and I've also learned painful lessons through failures so low I can hardly stand to think of them.

No man represents toxic white masculinity more than Donald Trump.

To defeat Donald Trump, the Democrats must run a stellar cast of all-stars in their primary.

Bill Clinton is just as gross as Donald Trump - so much so that the Clinton campaign can't really back Trump into a corner on his integrity or mistreatment of women because Bill's personal history is so damn awful.

How far can you go in life if you don't love yourself?

LISTEN: If you ever wondered what you would do if you were alive in the Civil Rights Movement, NOW IS THE TIME to find out. NOW. RIGHT NOW.

Generosity is giving until it makes you uncomfortable.