Andrew Young

“If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.”

“If Congress can move President's Day, Columbus Day and, alas, Martin Luther King's Birthday celebration for the convenience of shoppers, shouldn't they at least consider moving Election Day for the convenience of voters?”

“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.”

“President Jimmy Carter was a citizen soldier. Ironically, he was considered weak because he didn't kill anybody and he didn't get anyone killed.”

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

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

“I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“My feeling is that you don't go looking for troubles. The cross ought to find you. And so I never go out of my way. I figure I only get involved in things that I can't get around.”

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

“Violence is not more efficient than non-violence.”

“Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.”

“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.”

“Everybody is determined by his own experience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything that has happened in my life is because of good government and because the United States of America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth.”