Jessie Jackson Quotes
1. From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.
2. Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.
3. If you fall behind, run faster. Never give up, never surrender, and rise up against the odds.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.
7. Today’s students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
8. Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together.
9. No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.
10. I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven’t melted.
11. A man must be willing to die for justice. Death is an inescapable reality and men die daily, but good deeds live forever.
12. George Bush has met more foreign heads of state than I have. But a substantial number of them were dead.
13. When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
14. In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.
15. Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.
16. Our dreams must be stronger than our memories. We must be pulled by our dreams, rater than pushed by our memories.
17. Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.
18. We’ve removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams.
19. America is not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth.
20. Great things happen in small places. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville.
21. When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.
22. Your children need your presence more than your presents.
23. We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up.
24. I know they are all environmentalists. I heard a lot of my speeches recycled.
25. A check or credit card, a Gucci bag strap, anything of value will do. Give as you live.
26. Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.
27. It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.
28. If you run, you might lose. If you don’t run, you’re guaranteed to lose.
29. If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.
30. At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.
31. Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.
32. In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. The more you focus on sex without love, and drugs and violence, lifestyle of intimidation and recycling, the less energy you spend on opening up the big tent.
36. What is the American dream? The American dream is one big tent. One big tent. And on that big tent you have four basic promises: equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, equal access, and fair share.
37. There’s great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there’s a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.
38. Watch the walls come down, whether it’s in the South or on Wall Street. When the walls come down, what do we find? More markets, more talent, more capital and growth. Which means that the race and sex discrimination stunt economic growth. It’s not good for capitalism. It’s not good for America’s growth. And it’s not morally right.
39. We must all learn a good lesson – how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world… learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.
40. We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.
41. I think reconciliation is Obama’s goal – but the fight with the Republicans is like a fight with pit bulls, they never let go. Even worse, now the Republicans feel they can keep pushing and he will keep giving. They have not seen a stiff resistance on his part.
42. The American people on the ground need a clearer, stronger, Lyndon B. Johnson-type voice from their president. Obama has that voice. It has to be used.
43. Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is ‘not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.’ That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.
44. Urban America has been redlined. Government has not offered tax incentives for investment, as it has in a dozen foreign markets. Banks have redlined it. Industries have moved out, they’ve redlined it. Clearly, to break up the redlining process, there must be incentives to green-line with hedges against risk.
45. We’ve been so preoccupied with getting the government to behave in a fair and democratic way, we were not able to focus on the private sector where most of the jobs are, where most of the wealth and opportunities are.
46. Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don’t know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics.
47. We reveal our joys and successes, we conceal our pain.
48. My very first recollection of life on earth was waking up in bed with my mother, and she was showing me a picture of my father, Charles Jackson, with a group of soldiers.
49. I remember being taught my place.
50. I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn’t born in me.
51. I had to steal to survive.
52. Statehood for the District of Columbia is the most important civil rights and social justice issue in America today.
53. If the American people in a matter of months can love the people of Kuwait, whom they have not seen, they can love the people of our nation’s capital just as well.
54. There have been more people disenfranchised in Washington than there have been in Kuwait.
55. I take my role seriously as a pastor.
56. The relationship between the prophet and the President, the priest and the President, is a sacred one.
57. I know how to run a nationally paced campaign.
58. Any attempt to dilute my support for Sen. Obama will not succeed.
59. If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote.
60. You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate.
