Bill Cosby Quotes

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that's for progressives and conservatives.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

It isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.

I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

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.

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

I am angry about the world's conditions for black people.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior.