A Quote by James Meredith

Nothing has been more detrimental to me than to be considered a symbol, because I never stood for any of that... The civil rights movement thought they would do me harm over the years by disassociating themselves from me. Well, nothing in the world was more to my advantage. I was never one of them... I had my own divine mission.

James Meredith

Quote Topics

Advantage Any Because Been Civil Civil Rights Civil Rights Movement Considered Detrimental Divine Had Harm Me Mission More Movement My Own Never Nothing Over Own Rights Rights Movement Stood Symbol Than Them Themselves Thought Well World Would Years

Quote Author

James Meredith
American - Celebrity
Born: June 25, 1933

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights--the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights.

Frederick William Robertson

I grew up with the motto of "they can't kill you and eat you," and I still think that's right. You sure as hell can't! When it comes to speaking about my body makes other people uncomfortable but it doesn't make me uncomfortable. It makes them think more about themselves than it makes them judge me. I've always had this body and had to live with it. I've never been a little thing. I've been smaller but I've never been small, even as a baby. I've never had that window into that kind of world where people only talk to you because you're conventionally sexy.

Beth Ditto

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

Charles Lamb

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

James Meredith

I never want to impose my will on a community because even though I am the director of the movie, I can't direct them to be any more like themselves than they are. So it's very helpful to me because I can see the truth of their lives and their world right in front of me.

Niki Caro

I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.

Sara Paretsky

Christianity had never been more itself, more consistent with Jesus and more evidently en route to its own future, than in the launching of the world mission.

Ben F. Meyer

I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me. Everything influences me. I am quite different now than I was 40 years ago. For 40 years I have been traveling. I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

Josef Koudelka

For many years now, I have been an outspoken supporter of civil and human rights for gay and lesbian people. Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.

Coretta Scott King

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.

Dick Gregory

What you ain't never understood is that I ain't got nothing, don't own nothing, ain't never really wanted nothing that wasn't for you. There ain't nothing as precious to me...There ain't nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else--

Lorraine Hansberry

I always thought money was something just to make me happy. But I've learned that I feel better being able to help my folks, 'cause we never had nothing. So just to see them excited about my career is more of a blessing than me actually having it for myself.

Kendrick Lamar

I always thought money was something just to make me happy. But I’ve learned that I feel better being able to help my folks, ’cause we never had nothing. So just to see them excited about my career is more of a blessing than me actually having it for myself.

Kendrick Lamar

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

Arthur Golden

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.