The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.
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.
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.
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.
Obama is to the Tea Party as the moon is to werewolves.
You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.
As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.
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.
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.
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.
Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.
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.
You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.
Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.
The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.
I’ve appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980.
Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.
I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years.
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.
I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia.
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.