Quotes about discrimination
A collection of quotes on the topic of discrimination, people, doing, use.
Quotes about discrimination

“ A New Storm Against Imperialism https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_80.htm” (1968)

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/education/mayor_michael_bloomberg_delivers_slate_60_dinner_keynote_address_at_william_j_clinton_presidential_library
Philanthropy

“Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.”
"As I Please," Tribune (11 August 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

William Scott Wilson, Gregory Lee. Ideals of the Samurai: Writings of Japanese Warriors, 1982. p 92

Anecdotes of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, from Anecdote 158, "Monthly Period is the Flower," p. 128.
Anecdotes of Oyasama

Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 2 : Transformed nonconformist

Interview (January 1965?)
By any means necessary: speeches, interviews, and a letter (1970)
Context: I am not a racist. I am against every form of racism and segregation, every form of discrimination. I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.

“A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.”

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at a special hearing in Cape Town https://web.archive.org/web/20050119042614/http://www.doj.gov.za:80/trc/media/1997/9705/s970514a.htm (May 1997)
1990s, 1997

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)

Obituary in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/30/rita-levi-montalcini
About

From a letter by Hajjaj to Muhammad bin Qasim. MacLean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind, 39. As quoted in Spencer, Robert (2018). The history of jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.

allegedly said in 1907 according to 13 March 2013 article http://princearthurherald.com/en/politics-2/another-gaffe-by-trudeau-551 by Michael Eugenio of the Herald. The quote was also used 8 December 2015 by David Kendrick in Guelph Mercury https://www.guelphmercury.com/opinion-story/6163164-canada-is-losing-some-of-its-identity/
3 March 2017 report by Melissa Martin of Winnipeg Free Press https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/special/goodnews/moment-of-clarity-in-my-canada-415358084.html described as having been wrongly attributed for at least 7 years, based on a Teddy Roosevelt quote
Misattributed

“Don't say this is good and that is bad. Drop all discrimination. Accept everything as it is.”
Tantra: the Supreme Understanding (1984)

“I have an intensive hatred for discrimination based on colour.”
March 29, 1958, Maclean's.

it's just as important for you to do that as the President because I don't care how good the person, the leader you elect is, if the people want something different. In a democracy, at least, that's what's going to happen.
2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)

2015, Young African Leaders Initiative Presidential Summit Town Hall speech (August 2015)

2015, Town Hall meeting with Young Leaders of the Americas (April 2015)

c. 1946, p. 63-64
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

2016, United Nations Address (September 2016)

1978, Towards Understanding Islam, Chapter 7, Lahore, Pakistan.
1970s

About Margaret Deland's book John Ward, Preacher
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Interim report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred Maurice de Zayas http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A.67.277_en.pdf.
2012

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: For thirty-five years I have been more or less actively engaged in public life, in the performance of my political duties, now in a public position, now in a private position. I have fought with all the fervor I possessed for the various causes in which with all my heart I believed; and in every fight I thus made I have had with me and against me Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. There have been times when I have had to make the fight for or against some man of each creed on ground of plain public morality, unconnected with questions of public policy. There were other times when I have made such a fight for or against a given man, not on grounds of public morality, for he may have been morally a good man, but on account of his attitude on questions of public policy, of governmental principle. In both cases, I have always found myself 4 fighting beside, and fighting against, men of every creed. The one sure way to have secured the defeat of every good principle worth fighting for would have been to have permitted the fight to be changed into one along sectarian lines and inspired by the spirit of sectarian bitterness, either for the purpose of putting into public life or of keeping out of public life the believers in any given creed. Such conduct represents an assault upon Americanism. The man guilty of it is not a good American. I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be non-sectarian. As a necessary corollary to this, not only the pupils but the members of the teaching force and the school officials of all kinds must be treated exactly on a par, no matter what their creed; and there must be no more discrimination against Jew or Catholic or Protestant than discrimination in favor of Jew, Catholic or Protestant. Whoever makes such discrimination is an enemy of the public schools.

Dr. K.B. Hedgewar, Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Partial answers on the questions: "And what did you mean when you said you would come back? Would you lobby Congress? Maybe explore the political arena again?"
2017, Final News Conference as President (January 2017)

Section 255
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Letter to Henry Laurens (20 March 1779) https://web.archive.org/web/20141008220806/http://amrevmuseum.org/reflections/african-americans-continental-army-and-state-militias-during-american-war-independence
1770s, Letter to Henry Laurens (1779)

"Trouble Every Day"
Freak Out! (1966)

Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200, 239 (1995) (Scalia, J., concurring).
1990s

That’s all
Nederland 2 documentary "The Night of Fortuyn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgM9JozWOf0

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

§ I
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Context: In all the world there are only two kinds of people — those who know, and those who do not know; and this knowledge is the thing which matters. What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs — these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge — the knowledge of God's plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution. When once a man has seen that and really knows it, he cannot help working for it and making himself one with it, because it is so glorious, so beautiful. So, because he knows, he is on God's side, standing for good and resisting evil, working for evolution and not for selfishness.
If he is on God's side he is one of us, and it does not matter in the least whether he calls himself a Hindu or a Buddhist, a Christian or a Muhammadan, whether he is an Indian or an Englishman, a Chinaman or a Russian. Those who are on His side know why they are here and what they should do, and they are trying to do it; all the others do not yet know what they should do, and so they often act foolishly, and try to invent ways for themselves which they think will be pleasant for themselves, not understanding that all are one, and that therefore only what the One wills can ever be really pleasant for any one. They are following the unreal instead of the real. Until they learn to distinguish between these two, they have not ranged themselves on God's side, and so this discrimination is the first step.
But even when the choice is made, you must still remember that of the real and the unreal there are many varieties; and discrimination must still be made between the right and the wrong, the important and the unimportant, the useful and the useless, the true and the false, the selfish and the unselfish.

§ I
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Context: The first of these Qualifications is Discrimination; and this is usually taken as the discrimination between the real and the unreal which leads men to enter the Path. It is this, but it is also much more; and it is to be practised, not only at the beginning of the Path, but at every step of it every day until the end. You enter the Path because you have learnt that on it alone can be found those things which are worth gaining. Men who do not know, work to gain wealth and power, but these are at most for one life only, and therefore unreal. There are greater things than these — things which are real and lasting; when you have once seen these, you desire those others no more.

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)
Context: But what I said to the civil society groups is, yes, it is important to protect specific ethnic groups from discrimination. And it is natural in a democracy that ethnic groups organize among themselves to be heard in the halls of power. So in the United States, for example, as its democracy developed, the Irish in big cities, they came together and they built organizations, and they were able to promote the interests of Irish Americans. And African Americans, when they were seeking their freedom, you had organizations like the NAACP that promoted the interests of African Americans. So there's nothing wrong with groups organizing around ethnic identity, or around economic interests, or around regional concerns. That's how a democracy naturally works. You get with people who agree with you or who are like you to make sure that your concerns are heard. But what I said is that it is important for a democracy that people's identities are also a national identity. If you walk down the streets of New York City, you will see people looking more different than this group right here. You'll see blue-eyed, blonde people. You'll see dark-skinned, black people. You'll see Asians. You'll see Muslims. You'll see -- but if you ask any of those people, “What are you?” -- I'm American. Now I may be an African American or an Asian American or an Irish American, but the first thing I'll say is, I'm an American. And if you don't have that sense of national unity, then it's very hard for a country to succeed -- particularly a small country like Myanmar. If people think in terms of ethnic identity before national identity, then I think over time the country will start breaking apart and democracy will not work. So there has to be a sense of common purpose. But that's not an excuse then for majority groups to say, don’t complain, to ethnic minorities -- because the ethnic minorities may have some real complaints. And part of what is important for the majority groups to do -- if, in fact, you have a national identity, that means that you've got to be concerned with a minority also because it reflects badly on your country if somebody from a minority group is not being treated fairly. America could not live up to its potential until it treated its black citizens fairly. That's just a fact, that that was a stain on America when an entire group of people couldn't vote, or didn't have legal protections. Because it made all [[United States Declarations of Independence|the Declarations of Independence and Constitution and rule of law, it made that seem like an illusion. And so when the Civil Rights Movement happened in the United States, that wasn't just a victory for African Americans, that was a victory for America because what it showed was that the whole country was going to be concerned about everybody, not just about some people. And it was a victory for America's national identity that it was treating minorities fairly. And that's I think how every country in ASEAN, including Myanmar, needs to think about these problems. You need to respect people's differences. You need to be attentive to the grievances of minorities that may be discriminated against. But both the majority and the minority, the powerful and the powerless, also have to have a sense of national identity in order to be successful.

“We don't properly discriminate.”
The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)
Context: We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

Remarks by President Obama and President Kenyatta of Kenya in a Press Conference at Kenyan State House in Nairobi, Kenya https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/25/remarks-president-obama-and-president-kenyatta-kenya-press-conference (July 25, 2015)
2015
Context: I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law, and that they are deserving of equal protection under the law and that the state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation. And I say that, recognizing that there may be people who have different religious or cultural beliefs. But the issue is how does the state operate relative to people. If you look at the history of countries around the world, when you start treating people differently -- not because of any harm they’re doing anybody, but because they’re different -- that’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen. And when a government gets in the habit of treating people differently, those habits can spread. And as an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently, under the law, and there were all sorts of rationalizations that were provided by the power structure for decades in the United States for segregation and Jim Crow and slavery, and they were wrong.

“Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them”
The Art of Persuasion
Context: Nothing is more common than good things: the point in question is only to discriminate them; and it is certain that they are all natural and within our reach and even known to all mankind.

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Context: No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man, between interest and interest. All that can be said is that it is highly undesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual initiative, and, on the other hand, that in a constantly increasing number of cases we shall find it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment. Nor can legislation stop only with what are termed labor questions. The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the state and the nation toward property.

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: We should meet this situation by on the one hand seeing that these immigrants get all their rights as American citizens, and on the other hand insisting that they live up to their duties as American citizens. Any discrimination against aliens is a wrong, for it tends to put the immigrant at a disadvantage and to cause him to feel bitterness and resentment during the very years when he should be preparing himself for American citizenship. If an immigrant is not fit to become a citizen, he should not be allowed to come here. If he is fit, he should be given all the rights to earn his own livelihood, and to better himself, that any man can have. Take such a matter as the illiteracy test; I entirely agree with those who feel that many very excellent possible citizens would be barred improperly by an illiteracy test. But why do you not admit aliens under a bond to learn to read and write within a certain time? It would then be a duty to see that they were given ample opportunity to learn to read and write and that they were deported if they failed to take advantage of the opportunity.

2010s, 2015, Address at the White House
Context: Mr. President, together with their fellow citizens, American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive, to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination. With countless other people of good will, they are likewise concerned that efforts to build a just and wisely ordered society respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions. And, as my brothers, the United States Bishops, have reminded us, all are called to be vigilant, precisely as good citizens, to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.

1900s
Context: You ask that Mr. Taft shall "let the world know what his religious belief is." This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.
Letter to Mr. J.C. Martin concerning religion and politics (6 November 1908) http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/txtspeeches/307.txt

Letter to Mr. J.C. Martin concerning religion and politics (6 November 1908)
1900s
Context: To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life. You are entitled to know whether a man seeking your suffrages is a man of clean and upright life, honorable in all of his dealings with his fellows, and fit by qualification and purpose to do well in the great office for which he is a candidate; but you are not entitled to know matters which lie purely between himself and his Maker. If it is proper or legitimate to oppose a man for being a Unitarian, as was John Quincy Adams, for instance, as is the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, at the present moment Chaplain of the Senate, and an American of whose life all good Americans are proud then it would be equally proper to support or oppose a man because of his views on justification by faith, or the method of administering the sacrament, or the gospel of salvation by works. If you once enter on such a career there is absolutely no limit at which you can legitimately stop.

quoted in Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins)

2018, Speech at the University of Illinoise Speech (2018)

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

RuPaul's Drag Race - S10E13 (2018)

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, p.69

Source: History of the Kataeb Party

“The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.”
“Leave it to a girl to take all the fun out of sex discrimination.
-Calvin”
Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.”
How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
Context: Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held — so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place — who knows?

“There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.”
Source: My Losing Season: A Memoir

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 69.

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

America...You Kill Me

Writing for the court, Smith v. Texas, 33 U.S. 129 (1940).

1960s, Address to Local 815, Teamsters and the Allied Trades Council (1967)

Woman's Rights to the Suffrage Speech (1873)

Autobiographical Essay (2001)
"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, INVISIBILITY

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up, Wisdom (1993).

Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, La Jota de Ingenieria, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.jotainjenieria.cl/ser-un-joven-comunista-por-karol-cariola, Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, Oceansur.com, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.oceansur.com/media/uploads/documents/files/prologo-karol.pdf,
Original: La educación en Chile ha sido modelada como un “bien de consumo”, hecho que fue aceptado por un amplio sector de la sociedad, con mucha resignación durante años, ellos creyeron que la Educación y la Salud debían ser tratados como cualquier otro tema.... Por esto no podemos dejar de reconocer el gran acierto del movimiento estudiantil al intervenir en las conciencias de miles de chilenos que hoy , ya no se conforman con la realidad del actual modelo de educación, que le hace sentido el cambio de esta añeja constitución, que entendieron necesaria una reforma tributaria, que ya no aguantan la sobre explotación de nuestros recursos naturales en beneficio de capitales extranjeros, es decir, Chile despertó y volvió a creer en la posibilidad de construir un país distinto, un país más justo, un país donde la educación y la salud estén garantizadas, un país donde los trabajadores tengan condiciones laborales dignas, donde los jóvenes no sean explotados ni mal tratados en su fuente laboral, donde las mujeres sean integradas con igualdad de derechos y oportunidades, un país donde se proteja el medio ambiente, en que los recursos naturales sean explotados para mejorar las condiciones de su pueblo, un país donde la cultura se desarrolle libremente, un país en el que haya acceso a la literatura, un país donde los niños no sufran la discriminación desde que nacen por no tener dinero, un país donde caminar por las calles no sean un temor constante de ser asaltados, un país donde los jóvenes más desposeídos no tengan que recurrir a las drogas y la delincuencia para dar sentido a sus vidas, un país donde los abuelos no se sientan un estorbo, un país donde el desarrollo del conocimiento sea una tarea de la sociedad en su conjunto, un país donde el avance de la ciencia se ponga al servicio del pueblo, ese hermoso país es el que hoy estamos volviendo a soñar, porque con emoción lo vuelvo a mencionar, Chile está cambiando, hoy no somos los mismos que hace un año atrás, las esperanzas han resurgido a pesar del esmero de aquellos que propician la ideología neoliberal y que pretenden eternizar el capitalismo en un proceso de auto reproducción permanente, excluyendo toda posibilidad de una revolución social.