Andrew Young Quotes

Freedom is a struggle, and we do it together. Not only together as black citizens, but black and white together.

He knew when he had them, knew when they were getting bored, and knew when to wrap things up.

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.

The man with courage is a majority.

My solutions are to include Africa in the global economy, and not African charity, AIDS research, but African infrastructure development. And I think that Africa can import and needs everything the whole world can manufacture. And they have got enough money to pay for it. It's just that the money is in the ground.

Nike has always been a business about excellence and achievement.

I always quoted to my parents from Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet." Your children are not your children. They come through you, but not from you. You can give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they come from a land that you cannot enter, not even in your wildest dreams.

No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.

I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.

There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working ... for my own concerns. I have always had people advise me on what to say, but never on what not to say.

I was much more comfortable and a much better congressman running in a district that was 37 percent black, where I had to have a white constituency to get elected, than I would have been if I was in a 75 percent black district.

Profits should be for a purpose. Profits should be productive. You should make money for producing benefits that make the world a better place. Making money is a good thing when it is made in service to humanity or the democracy.

There is no safer place to put your money than in the middle of the U.S.

There can be no democracy without truth. There can be no truth without controversy, there can be no change without freedom. Without freedom there can be no progress.

Do not try to live your children's lives out of your own frustrations.

We think it is complicated to change the world. Change comes little by little. Nothing worthwhile can happen in one generation.

There is a happy land, Far, far away, Where Saints in glory stand, Bright, bright as day.

In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.

Our school systems have to realize that everybody doesn't learn the same way, and no one learns without some emotional support.

I wouldn't listen to my parents, but I found out that I absorbed. I never heard what they said - told me - but I did what they did.

Both the brightness and the spectrum of the X-rays are very different from what theory predicts.

I was raised that way: don't get mad, get smart.

We've changed in the sense that we flipped - and this is no longer the Republican party of Lincoln. This is the party of suppression.

Wishing of all strategies, is the worst.

Martin Luther King said America had given a bad check to black people.

President Jimmy Carter was a citizen soldier. Ironically, he was considered weak because he didn't kill anybody and he didn't get anyone killed.

Influence is like a savings account. The less you use it, the more you've got.

Look at those they call unfortunate and at a closer view, you'll find many of them are unwise.

Everybody is determined by his own experience.

I've always seen the Olympics as a place where you could act out your differences on the athletic field with a sense of sportsmanship and fairness and mutual respect.

The unsung heroes of the civil rights movement were always the wives and the mothers.

I like my life. I've had a good life. I think the reason is my parents taught me that life is a burden. But if you take it one day at a time, it's an easy burden.

Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized.

Everybody in America has been dependent on the government at some time. We owe everybody in America the right to vote and access to capital. What I say is, let's make America work, let's make democracy and free enterprise work for everybody.

Any racial reconciliation we've had in this country has come not out of confrontation but out of a spirit of reconciliation. If we continue to practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we'll eventually end up with a land of people who are blind and toothless.

These new songs that I sing
Were islands in the sea
That never missed a spring,
No, nor a century.

A starry voyager,
I to these islands come
Knowing not by what star
I am at last come home.

What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better.

When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.

I had to get a second passport in a hurry.

Beauty and love are all my dream;
They change not with the changing day;
Love stays forever like a stream
That flows but never flows away;

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

Everything that has happened in my life is because of good government and because the United States of America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth.

I tried. But not everybody thought so.

Having personally watched the Voting Rights Act being signed into law that August day, I can't begin to imagine how we could have all been so wrong in believing that more Americans would vote once they were all truly free to do so.

The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

I'm against voter fraud in any form, and I have long supported a national voter ID card. But ID cards need not - and must not - restrict voting rights in any way, shape or form.

I've been dyslexic and had Attention Deficit Disorder at some time in my life. I still read with a highlighter, but I've always loved to read.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but we think we can have wealth without good ideas and without values and without a clear vision. Wealth without vision is insanity.

Violence is not more efficient than non-violence.

My hope for my children must be that they respond to the still, small voice of God in their own hearts.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

I see the war problem as an economic problem, a business problem, a cultural problem, an educational problem - everything but a military problem. There's no military solution. There is a business solution - and the sooner we can provide jobs, not with our money, but the United States has to provide the framework.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.

For most of the world, civil and political rights ... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

One of the principles of nonviolence is that you leave your opponents whole and better off than you found them.

Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

I have about concluded that wealth is a state of mind, and that anyone can acquire a wealthy state of mind by thinking rich thoughts.

Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.

To whom much is given, much is required - not expected, but required.

More and more I find I'm really impressed with how much my son knows and how much he thinks like me. But he never would agree with me and he never would listen to me on anything.