Julian Bond Quotes

You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings.

The First Amendment means everything to me.

There is a thin line between politics and theatricals.

The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied rights granted to others.

What we mean by integration is not to be with them (whites) but to have what they have.

People don't just show up and lie down in the middle of the street some place out of nothing. Somebody said meet me there, let's get together, and let's do this thing. The interesting thing is that we don't know who all of the leaders of these groups are, but we know that they're out there, and we know a new group of leadership is being created. It shows you that leadership can come from anywhere.

You know, I come from six generations of college graduates.

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

There is no coloration to rights. Everybody has rights. I don't care who you are, where you come from. You got rights. I got rights. All God's children got rights. There is no coloration to rights. Everybody has rights. I don't care who you are, where you come from. You got rights. I got rights. All God's children got rights.

As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.

Griffin Bell later apologized to me for that decision.

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.

Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.

Obama is to the Tea Party as the moon is to werewolves.

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.

The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,

The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place.

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service.

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself,

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.

I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life.

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.

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

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.

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years.