Quotes about white
page 17

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Howell Cobb photo
Max Beckmann photo

“The trenches wound in meandering lines and white faces peered from dark dugouts – a lot of men were still preparing the positions, and everywhere among them there were graves. Where they sat, beside their dugouts, even between the sandbags, crosses stuck out. Corpses jammed in among them. It sounds like fiction – one man was frying potatoes on a grave next to his dugout. The existence of life here had already become a paradoxical joke.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

a letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 21 May, 1915; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 213
1900s - 1920s

Megyn Kelly photo
Johnnie Ray photo
Brad Paisley photo
Gunnar Myrdal photo
John Trudell photo
Ramsay MacDonald photo

“He had been across the veldt, he had seen the battlefields, the still open trenches, and it all came to Chinese labour. They were told it was going to release the slaves, the Uitlanders, to open up South Africa to a great flood of white emigrants. They were told it was going to plant the Union Jack upon the land of the free. But the echoes of the muskets had hardly died out on the battlefields, the ink on the treaty was hardly dry, before the men who plotted the war began to plot to bring in Chinese slaves. (Cheers.) They could talk about their gold; their gold is tainted. (Hear, hear.) They could talk about employing white men; it was not true, and even if it were true, was he going to stand and see his white brothers degraded to the position of yellow slave drivers? No, he was not. (Loud and continued cheers.) These patriots! These miserable patriots! If they had had the custodianship of the opinions of the country 75 years ago, slavery in the colonies would have continued. When the north was fighting the south for the liberty of men, these men would have counted their guineas, would have told them how many white men had plied the lash in the southern states, and they would have said that for miserable cash, miserable trash, the great name of the country required to be bought and sold. Thank God there were no twentieth century Unionist imperialists in office then.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Loud cheers.
Leicester Daily Mercury (6 January 1906)
1900s

Ian Smith photo
Eric Foner photo
Susan Sarandon photo
James Comey photo
Kazimir Malevich photo

“I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white, besides me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity. I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea lies before you.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

In the 'Catalogue 10th State Exhibition', Kasimir Malevich, Moscow, 1919; as quoted in Autocritique, – essays on art and anti-art 1963 – 1987, Barbara Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988, p. 71
1910 - 1920

Alessandro Del Piero photo
Sister Souljah photo

“If there are [any good white people], I haven't met them. Where are they?”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

Remarks in her video for "The Final Solution: Slavery's Back in Effect" (1992)

Andrea Dworkin photo
W.E.B. Du Bois photo
Victor Davis Hanson photo
Mahatma Gandhi photo

“We are our own slaves, not of the British. This should be engraved on our minds. The whites cannot remain if we do not want them. If the idea is to drive them out with firearms, let every Indian consider what precious little profit Europe has found in these.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Introduction to the publication of Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu, Indian opinion, 25 December, (1909)
1900s

Frederick Douglass photo
Cormac McCarthy photo

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

W. Somerset Maugham photo

“She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Source: A Writer's Notebook (1946), p. 189

Larry Wall photo

“Even the White House has a press agent.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199804150048.RAA08083@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Robert E. Howard photo
A. Philip Randolph photo

“If the Church, white or black, is to express the true philosophy of Jesus Christ, Himself a worker, it will not lend itself to the creed of oppressive capitalism which would deny to the servant his just hire.”

A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) African-American civil-rights movement leader

"Negro Labor and the Church," in Capitalism vs. Collectivism: The Colonial Era to 1945, Volume 3 of African American Political Thought (Routledge African Studies: 2003), p. 136

Charles James Fox photo
Federico García Lorca photo

“But now he sleeps endlessly.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
slides on frozen horns,
faltering souls in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquivir.
Oh, white wall of Spain!
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!”

Pero ya duerme sin fin.
Ya los musgos y la hierba
abren con dedos seguros
la flor de su calavera.
Y su sangre ya viene cantando:
cantando por marismas y praderas,
resbalando por cuernos ateridos,
vacilando sin alma por la niebla,
tropezando con miles de pezuñas
como una larga, oscura, triste lengua,
para formar un charco de agonía
junto al Guadalquivir de las estrellas.
¡Oh blanco muro de España!
¡Oh negro toro de pena!
¡Oh sangre dura de Ignacio!
¡Oh ruiseñor de sus venas!
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

H. G. Wells photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.”

The Cloud, iv; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Allen West (politician) photo
Dmitriy Ustinov photo

“If the present White House leadership runs the gauntlet of common sense and the people's will for peace and challenges us by starting MX missile deployment, then the Soviet Union will respond by deploying a new intercontinental ballistic missile of the same class, with its characteristics in no way inferior to those of the MX.”

Dmitriy Ustinov (1908–1984) Soviet military commander and politician

Quoted in "The Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals" - by Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (U.S.) - Arms control - 1982 - Page 57.

Madison Grant photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Joseph Rodman Drake photo
Charles Baudelaire photo

“I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone;
And my breast, where everyone is bruised in his turn,
Has been made to awaken in poets a love
That is eternal and as silent as matter.I am throned in blue sky like a sphinx unbeknown;
My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans;
I detest any movement displacing still lines,
And never do I weep and never laugh.”

<p>Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour
Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.</p><p>Je trône dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris;
J’unis un cœur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.</p>
"La Beauté" [Beauty] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Beaut%C3%A9_%28Les_Fleurs_du_mal%29
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Ben Croshaw photo
Jack White photo

“I would love to be Jack White — or maybe I want the peo­ple who like Jack White to also like me. But I”m the guy who writes beau­ti­ful music at 85 beat per minute.”

Jack White (1975) American musician and record producer

John Mayer
Eells, Josh (June 21, 2012). "John Mayers Regrets." Rolling Stone. 1159:48-53
About

Frank Wilczek photo
Albert Lutuli photo
David Brooks photo
Clement Attlee photo

“We are told in the White Paper that there is danger against which we have to guard ourselves. We do not think you can do it by national defence. We think you can only do it by moving forward to a new world – a world of law, the abolition of national armaments with a world force and a world economic system. I shall be told that that is quite impossible.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1935/mar/11/defence in the House of Commons (11 March 1935). Attlee's concluding observation was met by Conservative cries of "Hear, hear", with one MP shouting "Tell that to Hitler" according to The Times of 12 March 1935.
1930s

Humphrey Lyttelton photo

“Now it's time to play a brand new game called Name That Barcode. Here's the first one: "Thick black, thin white, thick black, thick white, thick black, thin white."”

Humphrey Lyttelton (1921–2008) English jazz trumpeter

OK who's going to identify that?
The Guardian, Saturday 26 April 2008

Philip K. Dick photo
Murray N. Rothbard photo

“It is the state that is robbing all classes, rich and poor, black and white alike; it is the state that is ripping us all off; it is the state that is the common enemy of mankind.”

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) American economist of the Austrian School, libertarian political theorist, and historian

Murray Rothbard, “The Noblest Cause of All,” Address to the Libertarian Party Convention (1977), Lewrockwell.com https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/the-noblest-cause-of-all/

Jesse Jackson photo

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved…. After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in "Crime: New Frontier - Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue" by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original). Partially quoted in "In America; A Sea Change On Crime" http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/opinion/in-america-a-sea-change-on-crime.html by Bob Herbert, 12 December 1993, New York Times.

Matthijs Maris photo
Chris Rock photo

“You can't beat white people, you can only knock them out.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Chris Rock on Real Time with Bill Maher, September 26, 2008
Miscellaneous

Maneka Gandhi photo

“It is so naturally high in fat that it leads to obesity, the cause of all modern disease. Ayurveda actually lists milk as one of the five white poisons.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On drinking milk, as quoted in "Ayurveda actually lists milk as one of the five white poisons" http://www.rediff.com/news/2000/apr/11inter.htm, Rediff (12 April 2000)
1991-2000

David Cross photo
Rahm Emanuel photo
Ben Croshaw photo

“Consider how The Dark Knight got away with a rating of PG-13 in the US by skilfully not showing any blood. Does that make it any more suitable for children? Or will there be a generation of youngsters haunted by visions of white-faced sadists brandishing pencils?”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://web.archive.org/web/20081015182445/http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24493980-5014239,00.html
Other Articles

Ron Paul photo
Charles Mingus photo
Kate Bush photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the white man.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1780s, Letter to the Marquis de Chastellux (1785)

“The average black household earned one-sixth as much as the average white household in 2000, down from one-quarter in 1995.”

Patrick Bond (1961) American academic

Source: South Africa and Global Apartheid: Continental and International Policies (2003), p. 8

Robert Denning photo

“No white anything (except sheets).”

Robert Denning (1927–2005) American interior designer

Patricia Volk, " The Sweet Smell of Excess http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/style/tmagazine/08texcess.html", The New York Times (October 8, 2006; retrieved October 4, 2007).

Enoch Powell photo
George Hendrik Breitner photo

“Yesterday it was divinely beautiful [at Scheveningen beach]. These barges lay in dense rows against the slope [of the beach], and between them one walked as between a fancy-built city and from above between all those tarred hulls coal-black, gray, green and white, a deep blue sky.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Gisteren was 't er [op het strand van Scheveningen] goddelijk mooi. Die schuiten lagen in dichte rijen tegen de [strand]-helling en daartussen ging men als tussen een fantastisch gebouwde stad en van boven tussen die geteerde rompen koolzwart, grijs, groen, [en] wit een diepe blauwe lucht.
In Breitner's letter to A.P. van Stolk, nr. 49, Den Haag 17 Dec. 1883; in the RKD-Archive, The Hague; as cited in the master-thesis Van Gogh en Breitner in Den Haag, Helewise Berger, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, p. 31
In 1881 already Breitner had rendered the surroundings of Scheveningen in the large 'Panorama of Mesdag', assisting Mesdag in this huge project
before 1890

Immortal Technique photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Dave Attell photo
Mitch McConnell photo

“With regard to White House officials, it will be up to the President to decide frankly whether and when and under what circumstances members of his [own White House staff] testify.”

Mitch McConnell (1942) US Senator from Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader

2007
Source: On the need for testimonies by G.W. Bush White House staffers Fox News Sunday http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/01/fox-catches-mcconnell/ (April 1, 2007)

Anne Sexton photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Ben Klassen photo
Antonin Scalia photo
William James photo
Glenn Beck photo

“They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are gonna poke and poke and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it. We must be — we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, "Kill all white babies."”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-07-12
Beck: "They want a race war … and our government is going to stand by and let them do it"
2010-07-12
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201007120021
on The New Black Panther Party
2010s, 2010

Dave Barry photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Ben Hecht photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Max Beckmann photo

“Oh I wish that I could paint again. Paint is an instrument without which I cannot survive for any length of time. Whenever I even think of gray, green and white, I am overcome with quivers of lust. Then I wish that this war would end and that I might paint again.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Quote from Beckmann's letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, first World war, 1915; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 14
Quote of Max Beckmann, one from a series of letters he wrote to his wife Minna Beckmann-Tube, being medic soldier at the front of World War 1.
1900s - 1920s

David Lee Roth photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Phillips Brooks photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Poul Anderson photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo

“Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme today the helmet of Navarre.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Ivry: A Song of the Huguenots http://www.bartleby.com/246/76.html, l. 29 (1824)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

Stanley A. McChrystal photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Jimmy Carter photo

“I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination. … Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Widely criticized remarks intended as support of open-housing laws, but specifying opposition to government efforts to "inject black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of integration" (April 1976), quoted in "THE CAMPAIGN: Candidate Carter: I Apologize" in TIME Magazine (19 April 1976) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,914056,00.html
Pre-Presidency

Roger Raveel photo

“As far as my exhibition concerned [opening was 8 May 1954, in Ghent].... there is however a recent and important painting hanging there 'Man met Boompje' [Man with tree, later titled 'The Gardener] - permettez-moi - with beautiful refracting matters and color: lemon-yellow spots and lacquerish black on white, (face) transparent pure light-blue with a very thin layer glacis over it (in the small wall) and strong-blue painted vertical line. Yellow brown and mauve brush-sweeps with small red dashes over it (for the small tree), and further a lot of beautiful white.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Wat nu mijn tentoonstelling betreft (opening was 8 mei 1954, in Gent].. .er is echter een recent en belangrijk werk bij n.l. 'Man met boompje' [later 'De Tuinman' getiteld] - permettez-moi- met mooie brekende materies en kleur: citroengele vlekken en lakachtig zwarte op wit, (gezicht) transparante zuivere lichte blauwe met een heel dunne glacis erover (in muurtje) en sterk blauwe geschilderde vertikale lijn. Geelbruine en mauve vegen met daarop kleine rode streepjes (voor boompje) verder veel mooi wit.
Quote of Raveel, in a letter to his friend Hugo Claus, from Machelen aan de Leie, May 1954; as cited in Hugo Claus, Roger Raveel; Brieven 1947 – 1962, ed. Katrien Jacobs, Ludion; Gent Belgium, 2007 - ISBN 978-90-5544-665-0, p. 164 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1945 - 1960

Sonia Sotomayor photo
Albert Lutuli photo
Grace Slick photo
Margaret Junkin Preston photo

“White as the blossoms which the almond tree,
Above its bald and leafless branches bears.”

Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897) American writer

The Royal Preacher, Stanza 5, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 19.

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo