Bayard Rustin Quotes

39 quotes in 608 categories

• When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going…
• The proof that one truly believes is in action.
• Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return…
• The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn
• Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.
• My activism did not spring from being black...The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief…
• Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth…
• Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging…
• Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.
• If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a…
• I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble.
• We are all one - and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way.
• You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people.
• Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I…
• The moral man is he who is opposed to injustice per se, opposed to injustice wherever he finds it; the moral man looks for injustice…
• The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar…
• Looking back at his career, Mr. Rustin, a Quaker, once wrote: ‘The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means;…
• Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There…
• There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also…
• When you're wrong, you're wrong. But when you're right, you're wrong anyhow.

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