Andrew Young

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

We've changed in the sense that we flipped - and this is no longer the Republican party of Lincoln. This is the party of suppression.

There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working... for my own concerns. I have always had people advise me on what to say, but never on what not to say.

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

Everybody in America has been dependent on the government at some time. We owe everybody in America the right to vote and access to capital. What I say is, let's make America work, let's make democracy and free enterprise work for everybody.

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

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

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

Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.

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.

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

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.

Violence is not more efficient than non-violence.

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.

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

Everybody is determined by his own experience.

I see the war problem as an economic problem, a business problem, a cultural problem, an educational problem - everything but a military problem. There's no military solution. There is a business solution - and the sooner we can provide jobs, not with our money, but the United States has to provide the framework.

Egypt's problem is that you've got an economy that works for about 40 million people, only you have 90 million people. The answer to the Egyptian problem is not guns, but jobs. We've got to find a private-sector, nongovernmental, aggressive way of creating jobs. That's not America's role totally.

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

We think it is complicated to change the world. Change comes little by little. Nothing worthwhile can happen in one generation.

I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.

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

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.

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

Our school systems have to realize that everybody doesn't learn the same way, and no one learns without some emotional support.

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.

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.

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 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.

There is no safer place to put your money than in the middle of the U.S.

You have to start living for something that's worth dying for.

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.

I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.

In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.

One of the principles of nonviolence is that you leave your opponents whole and better off than you found them.

Wishing of all strategies, is the worst.

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

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

Look at those they call unfortunate and at a closer view, you'll find many of them are unwise.

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.

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

The commercialization of sport is the democratization of sport.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but we think we can have wealth without good ideas and without values and without a clear vision. Wealth without vision is insanity.

Profits should be for a purpose. Profits should be productive. You should make money for producing benefits that make the world a better place. Making money is a good thing when it is made in service to humanity or the democracy.

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.

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.