A Quote by Shirley Sherrod

I grew up on a farm and, prior to my father's murder, I wanted to get away from the farm, and away from South Georgia where the Jim Crow laws absolutely controlled anything and everything we did. So, my goal was to leave once I completed high school. But on the night of my father's murder, I made a commitment that I would not leave the South, that I would stay and devote my life to working for change. So, my father's murder has shaped the course of my life even up to this very day.
I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
A man lusts to become a god... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?
My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.
I love helping other people. When I made a commitment to stay in the South, to work for change, it meant devoting my life to working for and helping others. I feel good when I know that I've saved someone's farm, or helped a family to get a home or access to credit. Or when I can get young people to see that there's more to life than just trying to make the biggest dollar for yourself.
My father was and is a great father. My father always wanted to do stand-up. He wanted to be an actor. But instead he did two jobs. He did customer service at a hospital and he worked as a waiter at night. He pretty much sacrificed everything for his daughters.
I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved. We can through violence burn down a building, but you can't establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. And what we're trying to get rid of is hate, injustice, and all of these other things that continue the long night of man's inhumanity to man.
Do you have to do murder? Do we have to do murder? Sure we have to do murder. There are only two subjects--a woman's chastity, and murder. Nobody's interested in chastity any more. Murder's all we got to write stories about.
Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.
I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape - jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I'll never forget.
If I could change anything, I would definitely have had a father around. My father. I would definitely say it affected me deeply as a young man, coming up. Who doesn't want a father? Those are the beginnings, and those are what can dictate the roads you choose in life, and choosing them well.
It is hard to tell if capital punishment has such an effect. And even if, in some contexts it has (such as in the American South with a very high incidence of murder), this effect may very well go away if a decent welfare state was replaced for the existing social order.
The greatest job I ever had was working on my family farm. Each morning my father would come into my bedroom around 4:30 am and command me to get up and work the fields. I would spend the next two hours before school slopping pigs and cropping tobacco.
My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. My father broke his hand on a guy's head once in school.
Being a child that grew up with a single mom back in the '70s, Father's Day to me was always a very uncomfortable time. At school, we would make Father's Day cards for our dads, and I usually mailed one to my dad, and he hardly ever responded.
The first Republican I knew was my father and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.
Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives.
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