Quotes about Equality

You don't have to love me but you damn well have to respect me.

If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

What's fair ain't necessarily right

That whites not only had no patent on Christianity; they were often its obstacle. That Jesus had been freed from white religion, and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be