Affirmative Quotes - page 3

Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty. (Jack Kemp)
And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know. View quote
James Earl Jones
Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you'd once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you'd felt compelled to erase? View quote
James K. Morrow
You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world. View quote
Russell Simmons
The various structures of sentences in any given language, comprising for example at least two nominal pieces and a verbal piece must be collated, and such categories as voice, mood, affirmative, negative, tense, aspect, gender, number, person and case, if found applicable and valid in descriptive statement, are to be abstracted from, and referred back to the sentence as a whole. View quote
John Rupert Firth
Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly. View quote
Andrew Young
Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making. View quote
Andrew Young
You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mr. In Between. View quote
Ann M. Martin
I don't know what this definition of affirmative action is for some. View quote
Chaka Fattah
Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women. View quote
Faye Wattleton
What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government. (Harold Washington)
Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place. View quote
Harold Washington
I don't want affirmative action - too much affirmative, not enough action. View quote
Paul Mooney
The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas. View quote
Quentin Bryce
I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it. View quote
Quentin Bryce
You have to give access to people with disabilities but there is no requirement to hire them. What I mean by affirmative obligation is that producers must take the necessary steps to include opportunities for people with disabilities and a vast majority of them do. View quote
Richard Masur
(If America abandons affirmative action, the country will take a giant step towards race war because there are) armies of raging blacks and furious Hispanics who would go ballistic over effectuation of the proposed campaigns to roll back the meager gains that nonwhites have made in America during a cruel century. View quote
Carl Rowan
(the effort to abolish affirmative action) is led mostly by conscienceless politicians, publicity-seeking bigots, whites with individual gripes who find it easy to make trouble in a litigious society, and a handful of blacks who harbor doubts about their own intellectual merits. View quote
Carl Rowan
You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action. View quote
Sonia Sotomayor
When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started. View quote
Sonia Sotomayor
There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects. (Sonia Sotomayor)
Affirmative action has to be combined with a broader program of social reform that would emphasize social rights: the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good health. Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn't. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn't provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues. View quote
William Julius Wilson
Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don't have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it. View quote
William Julius Wilson
I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday. View quote
Dick Gephardt
I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly. View quote
Dick Gephardt