These affirmative quotes will inspire you. Affirmative agreeing with or consenting to a statement or request; or supportive, hopeful, or encouraging.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging affirmative quotes, affirmative sayings, and affirmative proverbs.
Best Affirmative Quotes
- “The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn’t work.” ~ Harold Washington
- “When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I’m talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
- “I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.” ~ Camille Paglia
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“It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.” ~ John Burroughs
- “If you don’t like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?” ~ Maynard Jackson
- “And affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships, and college admittance.” ~ David Duke
- “Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.” ~ Andrew Young
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“Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets.” ~ Tracy Morgan
- “Here’s the point – you’re looking at affirmative action, and you’re looking at marijuana. You legalize marijuana, no need for quotas, because really, who’s gonna wanna work?” ~ Jon Stewart
- “In the final analysis courage is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, to the shocks which it is necessary to bear for the sake of realizing one’s own nature.” ~ Kurt Goldstein
- “I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I’ve changed my mind. And I’ve publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.” ~ Alan Dershowitz
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“You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
- “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.” ~ Russell Simmons
- “In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
- “White… is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black… God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within ‘black community’ by and large.” ~ Henry Louis Gates
- “We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children, who are advantaged, aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who struggled more.” ~ Barack Obama
- “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.” ~ Harold Washington , Affirmative quotes success
- “You have to give access to people with disabilities but there is no requirement to hire them. What I mean by affirmative obligation is that producers must take the necessary steps to include opportunities for people with disabilities and a vast majority of them do.” ~ Richard Masur
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“Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.” ~ Susan Estrich
- “There’s a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we’ve arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.” ~ Spike Lee
- “With my academic achievement in high school I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that – there are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
- “Affirmative action works but we’re going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.” ~ Harold Washington
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“There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action – to try to balance out those effects.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
- “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” ~ Tammy Bruce
- “Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.” ~ John Kasich
- “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.” ~ J. C. Watts
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“The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.” ~ Hermann Hesse
- “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.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
- “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.” ~ J. C. Watts
- “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.” ~ Sonia Sotomayor
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“Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.” ~ Joe Klein
- “If affirmative action means what I just described, what I’m for, then I’m for it.” ~ George W. Bush
- “We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.” ~ Bill Moyers
- “Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.” ~ Alan Keyes
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“I am an affirmative action hire.” ~ Anna Quindlen
- “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.” ~ J. C. Watts
- “Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a total banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems not now an open question. Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and I believe all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Action eradicates fear. No matter what you fear,— positive, self-affirming action can diminish or completely cancel that which you are fearful of.” ~ Mark Victor Hansen , Positive affirmative quotes
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“White men in Europe and the US are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world; it is called the history of the world.” ~ Michael Kimmel
- “Remember that God, during your prayers, is watching for your affirmative answer to the question which He is inwardly asking you: ‘Do you believe I am able to do this?’ To which question you must from the depth of your heart reply, ‘Yes, Lord'” ~ John of Kronstadt
- “Those in blue suits who use thinly veiled race symbols — when they say welfare and crime and three strikes and anti- affirmative action — they are sending messages more profound their language.” ~ Jesse Jackson
- “There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.” ~ Ruth Simmons
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“White men in North America are the beneficiaries of the single biggest affirmative action program in world history. It’s called world history.” ~ Michael Kimmel
- “Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.” ~ Alexander McCall Smith , Affirmative quotes life
- “Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.” ~ Clarence Thomas
- “Some would argue that the president himself benefited from a form of affirmative action because as a C student, he only got into Yale because his father was a wealthy alumnus. But the White House counters that Saddam is a menace and must be stopped.” ~ Jon Stewart
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“Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “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.” ~ Dick Gephardt
- “The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.” ~ James G. Frazer
- “This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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“The affirmative of affirmatives… is love.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn’t. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn’t provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues.” ~ William Julius Wilson
- “I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.” ~ Dick Gephardt
- “Thanks to the Polgars the adjective ‘men’s’ before events and the ‘affirmative action’ women’s titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.” ~ Garry Kasparov
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“Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong – wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.” ~ Jack Kemp
- “I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action.” ~ Joe Lieberman
- “I’m really disturbed by the degree to which I don’t hear people saying, “Are we leaving the world better than we found it?” I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.” ~ Marilynne Robinson
- “I ended Affirmative Action by executive order and replaced it with a leadership model that created more opportunities for African-American and Hispanic students.” ~ Jeb Bush
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“Didn’t we settle contraception & affirmative action? If the GOP keep going backwards they’ll soon be debating slavery.” ~ Andy Borowitz
- “You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he’s somebody, that God didn’t create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action.” ~ J. C. Watts
- “Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.” ~ John B. S. Haldane
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“Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.” ~ Cornel West
- “The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.” ~ Charles A. Murray
- “I’m pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment and pro-labor. I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America or I was going to be a happy Democrat.” ~ Wesley Clark
Affirmative asserting that the fact so gives an affirmative answer affirmative proof; or positive an affirmative approach.
