Affirmative Action Quotes

I think it’s worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

I’m always excited when I make it on anyone’s list – even if it’s for affirmative action. My attitude is, ‘Am I the token woman on this list? Because I’ll take it.’

My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women.

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.

Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left.

That’s the nightmare for Elizabeth Warren, because I can attack her from the left. I can say, ‘Wait a minute, what do you know about the journey of a person of color? You know nothing. This is all theory to you. Because you did lie. You took advantage of affirmative action.’

Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn’t work.

I believe that Harvard can have, and must have, a strong affirmative action program that reflects our commitment to equal opportunity while fully respecting the academic standards of the University.

I don’t want affirmative action – too much affirmative, not enough action.

What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government.

If we are prepared to invest the necessary time and effort, affirmative action can contribute to Harvard’s quality and not detract from it.

The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.

Affirmative action works but we’re going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

America has granted every wish of black Americans. It has made government the head of the black family; it has integrated the schools and neighborhoods; it has given blacks welfare and affirmative action; it has even apologized through Bill Clinton. There is simply nothing else that America can or should do.

I’m not one that believes that affirmative action should be based on one’s skin color or one’s gender, I think it should be done based on one’s need, because I think if you are from a poor white community, I think that poor white kid needs a scholarship just as badly as a poor black kid.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

Let’s be clear about one thing everyone should know: Affirmative action is constitutional.

I think Bush has capitulated on affirmative action and government spending. Apart from that, he’s OK, I guess. About the same as Howard Dean.

When I was a young filmmaker starting out, I was really snobby about all the affirmative action for women filmmakers because I felt it should be about your talent, and I made a film that won awards, and people wanted me.

It’s Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.

Blacks who have not succumbed to the victim culture have been, are, and will be doing quite well – all on their own, without handouts, affirmative action, and other patronizing measures.

In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

The sixth man, the position, I don’t have a problem with, but the award – it’s not that it’s not important, but being singled out, it’s like affirmative action or something like that to me. So, it’s like, whatever.

Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong – wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

I don’t know what this definition of affirmative action is for some.

And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

There’s been the same kind of demonizing of the word ‘feminism’ as words like ‘liberal,’ ‘affirmative action,’ and so on.

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

Republicans can be a funny bunch. They’re against affirmative action, but they always seem to be able to find people of color to fill a slot just when they’re most needed.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

To be clear, affirmative action is not, by itself, an adequate response to decades of systemic looting, but it has been an indispensible tool in inching us towards some semblance of a more equitable society.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.

Until affirmative action is described and understood as one mechanism by which to make amends for historical wrongdoing against members of marginalized communities, it will fail to meaningfully address the inequality that exists as a direct result of federal policy.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally – though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

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