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74 Observations on prejudice, racism, and bigotry
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Published Friday, August 22, 2014 @ 9:59 PM EDT
Aug 22 2014

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.
-Jerry Garcia

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?
-Susan B. Anthony

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
-Gore Vidal

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
-Eugene O'Neill

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-H.L. Mencken

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.
-Michael Crichton

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
-James Madison

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
-Laurence J. Peter

Even if all parties approach the court's mandate with the best of conscious intentions... that mandate requires them to confront and overcome their own racism on all levels- a challenge I doubt all of them can meet.
-Thurgood Marshall

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices- just recognize them.
-Edward R. Murrow

Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.
-Lewis H. Lapham

Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition.
-Paul Keller

Freedom of the press... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.
-Robert Smith Surtees

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
-Albert Einstein

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.
-Charles Dickens

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
-Andrew Carnegie

How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
-Logan Pearsall Smith

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
-Benjamin Disraeli

I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
-H.L. Mencken

I don't have prejudice against myself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.
-Bob Marley

I don't like principles. I prefer prejudices.
-Oscar Wilde

I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.
-Margaret Chase Smith

I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
-Rod Serling

I have a friend who says the militia have one black helicopter that they fly their one black member around in, simultaneously scaring themselves and proving they aren't racist.
-K. Byington

I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

I think we can agree racial prejudice is stupid. Because if you spend time with someone from another race and really get to know them, you can find other reasons to hate them.
-Bernadette Luckett

I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust... We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.
-Thurgood Marshall

If we were to wake up some morning and that everyone was the same race, creed, and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.
-George Aiken

If you have too many white people at a rally, then your cause is racist. And if you have too many people of color at a rally, you must be asking for something.
-Jon Stewart

If you think about it, there's not a religious group, there's not a nationalistic group, there's not a tribe, there is no grouping of people to my knowledge, of any consequence, who have not, at one or another time, been the object of hatred, racism, or who has not had people against them just because they were them.
-Alex Haley

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice dies hard.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

In the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.
-Michael Crichton

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.
-Bishop John Shelby

Law is a reflection and a source of prejudice. It both enforces and suggests forms of bias.
-Diane B. Schulder

Liberalism, above all, means emancipation- emancipation from one's fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination... from poverty.
-Hubert H. Humphrey

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
-Elie Wiesel

No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and even more of national prejudice.
-H.L. Mencken

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
-William Hazlitt

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
-Lillian Hellman

Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharp and efficient tool. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see.
-Bernard Baruch

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
-Bertrand Russell

Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never.
-William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Point of view must mean more than mere prejudice; it should express conclusions reached by that painful process known as thinking. And when new facts or factors are presented, free men shoul be as vigilant to change their viewpoints as to confirm them.
-A. Mortimer Astbury

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
-Ben Hecht

Prejudice is the child of ignorance...
-William Hazlitt

Prejudice is the reason of fools.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of nought but prejudice!
-Marquis de Sade

Prejudice supports thrones, ignorance altars.
-Marie Ebner von Ebner-Eschenbach

Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.
-Tryon Edwards

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.
-Charlotte Bronte

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.
-Alex Haley

Racism isn't born, folks. It's taught. I have a two-year-old son. Know what he hates? Naps. End of list.
-Denis Leary

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
-H.L. Mencken

The best antidote to prejudice is reality.
-Barney Frank

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.
-Albert Einstein

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

The food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.
-Cornelia Otis Skinner

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye: the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.
-Walter Lippmann

The true barbarian is he who thinks every thing barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.
-William Hazlitt

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Thinking is what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
-William James

To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self- respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

To me the earth's most explosive and pernicious evil is racism, the inability of God's creatures to live as One, especially in the Western world.
-Malcolm X

Under our constitutional system, courts stand, against any winds that blow, as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement.
-Hugo Black

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
-Oscar Wilde

We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart.
-George Washington

We have convinced over one billion members of the Islamic faith that we are prejudiced against their religion, that we would deny them freedom of religion, that we want suppress their culture and invade their governments.
-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition, and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists- and nothin' will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible.
-Penn Jillette

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.
-Dale Carnegie

Whom the gods would make bigots, they first deprive of humor.
-Rev. James M. Gillis

With a few exceptions, I'm skeptical of churches. I worry that they can't deal with issues like AIDS. I worry that the most racist places in the world can be places of worship. We have to build our churches in our hearts.
-Stevie Wonder

You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.
-Susan B. Anthony


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