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John Howard Griffin Quotes

This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed.

This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed.

John Howard Griffin
Law, Tendencies, Convenient
John Howard Griffin (2006). “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition”, p.71, Wings Press

The Negro. The South. These are the details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any 'inferior' group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.

John Howard Griffin
Real, Men, Numbers
"Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition".

He who is less than just is less than man.

John Howard Griffin
Men
John Howard Griffin (2006). “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition”, p.49, Wings Press

Every fool in error can find a passage of scripture to back him up

John Howard Griffin
Errors, Scripture, Fool
John Howard Griffin (2006). “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition”, p.127, Wings Press

When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.

John Howard Griffin
Justice, People, Minorities

If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.

John Howard Griffin
Country, Justice, Racism

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?

John Howard Griffin
Fear, Heart, Eye
John Howard Griffin (2006). “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition”, p.49, Wings Press

The completeness of this transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the serving one, and the one who panicked, who felt Negroid even to the depths of my entrails. I felt the beginings of great loneliness, not because I was a Negro, but because the man I had been, the self I knew, was hidden in the flesh of another.

John Howard Griffin
Loneliness, Men, Two

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