Answers for “Who Said It”
- “…I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever 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 a 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.” —Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates
- “I have respect for the Black people of my country and I want them to have their own life, too, and I want them to be able to pursue their own destiny and not be controlled, and not be damaged.” —David Duke
- “There is a romantic reverence—a sort of hero-worship—paid the Indian all over this country; while the negro is despised; yet the Indian rejects your civilization, and the negro accepts it.” —Frederick Douglass from Speech: We Are Here and Want the Ballot Box
- “Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.” ~ Mark Twain
- “unless it can be shown that there is room enough on earth for both savage and civilized, the savage must go” “It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development,…” Margaret Sanger
- “You say that the magistrate’s decision is unsatisfactory because it would enable a person, however unclean, to travel by a tram, and that even the Kaffirs would be able to do so. But the magistrate’s decision is quite different. The Court declared that the Kaffirs have no legal right to travel by tram. And according to tram regulations, those in an unclean dress or in a drunken state are prohibited from boarding a tram. Thanks to the Court’s decision, only clean Indians or colored people other than Kaffirs, can now travel in the trams.” Mohandas K. Gandhi
- “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.” President Thomas Jefferson
- “ In them days, it was just still not illegal to kill an Indian. If you killed an Indian you’d be very unfortunate if you got probation – most of them were released immediately” Leonard Peltier
- “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot… I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” Mother Teresa
- “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” President Thomas Jefferson
- ” We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone. We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race.” , . Mohandas K. Gandhi Indian Opinion, September 24 1903
- “The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.” Che Guevara
- “We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.” Che Guevara
- “labor in the white skin can never be free while labor in the black skin is in chains.” Karl Marx
- “With the black man, we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life “ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “It might also naturally be enquired whether man, like so many other animals, has given rise to varieties and sub-races, differing but slightly from each other, or to races differing so much that they must be classed as doubtful species?” Charles Darwin
- “The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.” Charles Darwin
- “Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone’s here.” – “Blacks gave me a standing ovation when they put the cap and gown on me, and that was the proudest I’ve ever been.” George Wallace
- …the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. Benjamin Franklin
- “it always irritates me to see Muslim women in the United States of America with – I was in the grocery store parking lot one day when a group of Muslim women in the black. They had the full black enveloping – what do they call that costume? … the headscarf and the voluminous black thing that goes down to the floor. ” Alice Paul
- “The [N-word], like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of races, history, what-not
” Walt Whitman
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The point of this exercise is to show how complicated this is. Known racists can say enlightened things and enlightened people can say unbelievably racist things.