Jesse Jackson Quotes - Page 2

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

That's just like America. It's made up of lots of different people. We're all different colors, different ages, we do different jobs -- but it takes all of us black people, white people, brown people, men and women, young and old, working in the factories, working in the fields, working in offices, working in stores -- it takes a lot of different kinds of people to get the job done for America.

Most poor people are not on welfare. . . I know they work. I'm a witness. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people's children. They work every day. They clean the streets. They work every day. They drive vans with cabs. They work every day. They change beds you slept in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work every day . . .

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.

Our goal was not freedom. Freedom was the necessary prerequisite to get to equality.

When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

That's all Hymie wants to talk about is Israel. Every time you go to Hymietown that's all they want to talk about.

Tears will get you sympathy, sweat will get you change.

You know, people'd always ask "Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?" They never seen the house I'm running from.

Leadership cannot just go along to get along. Leadership must meet the moral challenge of the day.

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

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

It is in struggle and service with our brothers and sisters, individually and collectively, that we find the meaning of life.

When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.

No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to fly high.

The trouble is that nonviolence is so often defined as refusal to fight, and that is the American definition of cowardice. In fact, marching unarmed against the guns and dogs of the police requires more courage than does aggression. The perverted idea of manhood coming from the barrel of a gun is what keeps people from understanding nonviolence.

We live on the dash between our birth date and our death date.

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.

That Obama I would like to cut his nuts off.

We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. Jesus said that we should not be judged by the bark we wear but by the fruit that we bear. Jesus said that we must measure greatness by how we treat the least of these.

I came to the conclusion that in order to end racial barriers, I needed to run for the office of the president and put forth an agenda of social justice and world peace. In addition, I concluded that someone needed to run and challenge the liberal orthodoxy.

Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.

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.

I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.