Jesse Jackson Quotes

America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth.

If you wear a hoodie but aren't registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.

If you don't know what tomorrow holds, you need to know who holds tomorrow!

You can't plant a seed and pick the fruit the next morning.

The only justification for ever looking down on somebody is to pick them up.

It's not enough to be quiet. Quietness is the absence of noise. We need peace, the presence of justice and to be - and so people here can coexist and live together.

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

We picked their cotton. We cooked their food. We nursed their babies. Now we can run their cities. We can run their states. We will run the country.

Gangs are a group reaction to helplessness.

Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.

His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.

Hymies." And "Hymietown.

You cannot teach what you don't know. You cannot give energy if you're not on fire on the inside.

Conservatives and liberals can find common ground.

Politicians refuse to modernize schools, they cut out midnight basketball, but build all these new jails. First class jails, second class schools. This is zero tolerance.

I know they are all environmentalists. I heard a lot of my speeches recycled.

When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.

God doesn't make orange juice, God makes oranges.

We are facing a stiff wind right now, but if we persist and keep fighting back, we will prevail.

Peace is the alternative to war, and nonviolence should be seen as the antidote to violence, not simply as its opposite. Nonviolence is more concerned with saving life than with saving face.

Life has its dimensions in the mysterious.

Black and Jewish leaders have been a coalition of conscience.

When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.

Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.

So here we are today with a new conversation. When University of Georgia plays Georgia Tech, it's uniform color versus skin color. We have - we've overcome that level of racial fear.

I mean, the fight for a health care bill to cover all Americans and leave none behind is attacked as being a race appeal, which is not true, but then it's put out in the media as true.

Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs.

When you create more small businesses, you create small entrepreneurship. Out of that comes self-determination and employment.

I want to make it a little inconvenient for everybody to get to me.

There is no power in cynicism. There is no forward thrust in cynicism.

Abortion is black genocide...What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?

We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up.

Surrender had played out for good with me.

If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.

You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.

His [Donald Trump] urban policy is stop and frisk, law and order. And we need investment and development.

Our dreams must be stronger than our memories.

What we have to be judged by is the work we try to do. It's public service, not perfect service.

I cast my bread on the waters long ago. Now it's time for you to send it back to me - toasted and buttered on both sides.

Luck is a crossroad where preparation and opportunity meet

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.

From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.

The liberation of Blacks is not for Blacks only.

Race designation is a political designation.

A man who cannot be enticed by money or intimidated by the threat of jail or death has two of the strongest weapons that anyone has to offer.

In tough economic times, desperate people do desperate things, and the abortion rate goes up.

If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that.

I want to cut his nuts off.