Thomas Sowell Quotes

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

We seek ... not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.

Civil rights are civil rights. There are no persons who are not entitled to their civil rights... We have to recognize that we have a long way to go, but we have to go that way together.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

All rights are individual. We do not get our rights because we belong to a group. Whether it's homosexuals, women, minorities, it leads us astray. You don't get your rights belonging to your group. A group can't force themselves on anybody else. So there should be no affirmative action for any group.

We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

Rejecting the fundamental provision of the Civil Rights Act is a rejection of the foundational promise of America that all men and women should be treated equally, a promise for which many Americans have lost their lives.

I support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

... equal responsibilities are less popular than equal rights.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.