David Player > David's Quotes

“We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’ … are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Both occupy the lowest positions on the status hierarchies in their societies,” wrote Harvard political scientist Sidney Verba and his colleagues in a study of Dalits and African-Americans. Both have been “particularly singled out from other groups” based on characteristics ascribed to them.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Conspicuously outperforming one’s fellows is sometimes resented, as it makes people who are already feeling inferior feel even more inferior,” Matory wrote. “Honor is a zero-sum game, with particularly intense implications for the discredited, because… there is so little honor to go around.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The caste system has historically rewarded snitches and sellouts among the lowest caste, as with the enforcers in the concentration camps of the Third Reich and the slave drivers on southern plantations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The enforcers of caste come in every color, creed, and gender. One does not have to be in the dominant caste to do its bidding.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste in the South,” wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “is a system for arbitrarily defining the status of all Negroes and of all whites with regard to the most fundamental privileges and opportunities of human society.” It would become the social, economic, and psychological template at work in one degree or another for generations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson

“One of the tenets was “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“But care, it is our lot now,” Mama was saying. “It is our service to others that defines us. We are doers of the Word.”
― Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

“We are all products of our environment; every person we meet, every new experience or adventure, every book we read, touches and changes us, making us the unique being we are.”
― C.J. Heck

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
― Malcolm X

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite

“There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line - no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.”
― John F. Kennedy

“Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin

“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
― Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary

“My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
― Malcolm X

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
― Malcolm X

“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
― Malcolm X

“If you have no critics you'll likely have no success. ”
― Malcolm X

“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me