Quotes from Andrew Young

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.

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.

Wishing of all strategies, is the worst.

What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fool reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven.

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

I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

I was raised that way: don't get mad, get smart.

When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better.

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.

To find people who don't want anything is rare.

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

There is no safer place to put your money than in the middle of the U.S.

Egypt's problem is that you've got an economy that works for about 40 million people, only you have 90 million people. The answer to the Egyptian problem is not guns, but jobs. We've got to find a private-sector, nongovernmental, aggressive way of creating jobs. That's not America's role totally.

I see the war problem as an economic problem, a business problem, a cultural problem, an educational problem - everything but a military problem. There's no military solution. There is a business solution - and the sooner we can provide jobs, not with our money, but the United States has to provide the framework.

Look at those they call unfortunate and at a closer view, you'll find many of them are unwise.

The man with courage is a majority.

The commercialization of sport is the democratization of sport.

I've always seen the Olympics as a place where you could act out your differences on the athletic field with a sense of sportsmanship and fairness and mutual respect.

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.