Andrew Young Quotes

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

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.

I had to get a second passport in a hurry.

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

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.

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

Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.

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.

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

It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The man with courage is a majority.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

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.

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.

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

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

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

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.

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.

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

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.

The commercialization of sport is the democratization of sport.

To find people who don't want anything is rare.

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.

I believe in humanitarian capitalism, and there are good people on Wall Street.

When the long, varnished buds of beech Point out beyond their reach, And tanned by summer suns Leaves of bright bryony turn bronze, And gossamer floats bright and wet From trees that are their own sunset, Spring, summer, autumn I come here, And what is there to fear? And yet I never lose the feeling That someone else behind is stealing Or else in front has disappeared; Though nothing I have seen or heard, Makes me still walk beneath these boughs With cautious step as in a haunted house.

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.

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.

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

I would define morality as enlightened self-interest...That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.

If I hadn't been so outspoken, Jimmy Carter wouldn't have wanted me.

Slavery didnt break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

If all I get is a little controversy for speaking the truth, if I did less, I would not be worth living.

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.

My daddy was determined to make me a dentist and a baseball player. And I loved my daddy but I wasted four years of college trying to do what he wanted me to do, and not what I felt I wanted to do.