Julian Bond Quotations

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas.

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you'd have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn't drop out and run away

Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action

The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place.

But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches - the grassroots - kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person

You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.

I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years

I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.

I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia

She was trained to be an opera singer. She gave concerts to raise money for him, and when he died she continued to try to keep his legacy alive.

She showed the world, not just me but everyone, what one person can do, ... She is one person who sparked a movement whose ripples are still being felt, not just all over the country, but all over the world.

She developed the King Center in Atlanta, and she made it possible for his message, particularly his emphasis on nonviolence which many people sort of have let slip -- she helped keep that alive.

She played a great role when her husband was alive in assisting him. They were truly partners in every sense.

People who are poor who are living on the edge of poverty or who are living under poverty are tucked away some place else. I don't see them; they don't see me; we don't interact; we have no relation one to the other; no physical relation.

I said, 'Read these books and you don't have to be here.

Part of my task is to modernize the institution and to hasten a kind of quickness, instead of this ponderous way we have of dealing with things.

Many are attracted to social service-the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Martin Luther King belonged to another transcendent generation. A generation born into segregation; a generation freed from racism's restraints by their own efforts; a generation equally determined to see their way as free women and men.

When that message is coupled with anti-Semitism, with homophobia, with anti-Catholicism, and with a real contempt for American democracy, then the whole message becomes bankrupt and has to be discarded and set aside,

We quickly became aware that this was bigger than we thought and that we would have to dig deeper and do more. And we're still doing it today.

First, this middle class I think owes its existence to both affirmative action and the expansion of opportunity for people with skills and training.

quiet example demonstrated to millions new ways to confront the evil of segregation.

A lot of people are gone. You lose that witness, that personal testimony.

It's a cliche to say she was the mother of the civil rights movement, but she was.

It means something for us to know that history and get some feel for who the people were,

In some ways it reflects the realities of the 1950s: There were relatively few women in public leadership roles, ... So that small subset that becomes prominent in civil rights would tend to be men. But that doesn't excuse the way some women have just been written out of history.

But I think the movement was a mix of who was black and young and who was in college then. We came from a variety of backgrounds.

He always had such a fierce determination to fight segregation in every possible way.

We know that if whites and nonwhites vote in the same percentages as they did in 2000, Bush will be re-defeated by 3 million votes.

The First Amendment means everything to me.

I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life.

You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on.

People see America through particular lenses, either their profession, their race or their gender. So the party that speaks to our racial perceptions and offers solutions to the racial difficulties which we face is the party that's going to be rewarded with our votes.

The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,

What we mean by integration is not to be with them (whites) but to have what they have.

Marriage is a civil right. If you don't want gay people to marry in your church, good for you. But you can't say they can't marry in your city.

Working in a situation with men and women, and seeing women take on roles equal to the roles taken by men made you understand that, "Hey, these people can do things too." And I think it made me and other people in the movement realize that we're living in a community of equals. And that among those equals, they have equal rights. And we ought to respect their rights if they respected ours.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself,

You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.

Obama is to the Tea Party as the moon is to werewolves.

There is no coloration to rights. Everybody has rights. I don't care who you are, where you come from. You got rights. I got rights. All God's children got rights. There is no coloration to rights. Everybody has rights. I don't care who you are, where you come from. You got rights. I got rights. All God's children got rights.

People don't just show up and lie down in the middle of the street some place out of nothing. Somebody said meet me there, let's get together, and let's do this thing. The interesting thing is that we don't know who all of the leaders of these groups are, but we know that they're out there, and we know a new group of leadership is being created. It shows you that leadership can come from anywhere.

It takes people who have a widespread series of experiences to develop future leaders. It takes people who aren't afraid to challenge and move forward.

There's this big debate that goes on in America about what rights are: Civil rights, human rights, what they are? it's an artificial debate. Because everybody has rights. Everybody has rights - I don't care who you are, what you do, where you come from, how you were born, what your race or creed or color is. You have rights. Everybody's got rights.

Discrimination is discrimination no matter who the victim is, and it is always wrong. There are no special rights in America, despite the attempts by many to divide blacks and the gay community with the argument that the latter are seeking some imaginary special rights at the expense of blacks.

If your Bible tells you that gay people ought not be married in your church, don't tell them they can't be married at city hall. Marriage is a civil rite as well a civil right, and we can't let religious bigotry close the door to justice to anyone.

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.