Quincy Jones Quotes

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

With all the other -isms that we deal with, that sort of nameless -ism that we have in too many of our hearts against the poor in this country is what wounds us most broadly.

Ninety percent of the racial debate is really about economics.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Colorism and racism don't stop when you're a musician or when you have wealth or when you're in any given position.

Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it's just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

People look at me, and they go, 'You're white, you're smart, you must have went to college. You must have grown up with money.'

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

…national wealth, especially when carefully accumulated in the hands of a few individuals, is dangerous in the extreme to human liberty.

Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice

The wealthiest in this country have never had it so good. They want more, and more, and more, and more, and they don’t care how many children they have to step on to get it..

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

Over time, economic benefits are accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to economic autocracy and political despotism.

If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.