John Lewis famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

When people tell me nothing has changed, I say come walk in my shoes and I will show you change.
-- John Lewis

#Shoes #People #Changed
We will stand up for what is right, for what is fair and what is just. Health care is a right and not a privilege.
-- John Lewis

#Care #Privilege #Health Care
You cannot be afraid to speak up and speak out for what you believe. You have to have courage, raw courage.
-- John Lewis

#Believe #Speak #Have Courage
I have fought too hard and for too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I've heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry.
-- John Lewis

#Sex #Couple #Cutting
The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.
-- John Lewis

#Music #Rewards #Jazz
If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it.
-- John Lewis

#Moral #Obligation #Moral Obligation
The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.
-- John Lewis

#Rights #Saws #Movement
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
-- John Lewis

#Hatred #Political #Sowing
We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.
-- John Lewis

#May #Chosen
The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
-- John Lewis

#Military #Europe #Organization
I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956 with my brothers and sisters and first cousins, I was only 16 years old, we went down to the public library trying to check out some books and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors! It was a public library! I never went back to that public library until July 5th, 1998, by this time I'm in the Congress, for a book signing of my book "Walking with the Wind"
-- John Lewis

#Cousin #Brother #Kings
If you're not hopeful and optimistic, then you just give up. You have to take that long hard look and just believe that if your consistent, you will succeed
-- John Lewis

#Giving Up #Believe #Optimistic
I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.
-- John Lewis

#Philosophy #Night #Years
When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.
-- John Lewis

#Growing Up #Men #White
My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.
-- John Lewis

#Children #Parent #Noise
In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.
-- John Lewis

#Mean #Past #Ohio
I say to people today, 'You must be prepared if you believe in something. If you believe in something, you have to go for it. As individuals, we may not live to see the end.
-- John Lewis

#Believe #People #May
To make it hard, to make it difficult almost impossible for people to cast a vote is not in keeping with the democratic process.
-- John Lewis

#People #Impossible #Vote
The government, both state and federal, has a duty to be reasonable and accommodating.
-- John Lewis

#Government #States #Duty
My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.
-- John Lewis

#Mother #Father #Mother And Father
Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
-- John Lewis

#Music #Innovation #Dizzy
When I was a student, I studied philosophy and religion. I talked about being patient. Some people say I was too hopeful, too optimistic, but you have to be optimistic just in keeping with the philosophy of non-violence.
-- John Lewis

#Philosophy #Optimistic #People
When I was 15 years old in the tenth grade, I heard Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at the time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change
-- John Lewis

#Kings #Mean #College
We have come a long way in America because of Martin Luther King, Jr. He led a disciplined, nonviolent revolution under the rule of law, a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas. We've come a long way, but we still have a distance to go before all of our citizens embrace the idea of a truly interracial democracy, what I like to call the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself.
-- John Lewis

#Kings #Distance #Ideas
I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.
-- John Lewis

#Believe #Black History #Way
We live in a country where we're supposed to have freedom of the press and religious freedom, but I think to some degree, there's a sense of fear in America today, that if you say the wrong thing, what some people will consider what is wrong, if you step out of line, if you dissent, whether you be an entertainer, that somehow and some way this government or the forces to be will come down on you.
-- John Lewis

#Country #Religious #Freedom
If someone had told me in 1963 that one day I would be in Congress, I would have said, 'You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about.
-- John Lewis

#Crazy #Talking #One Day

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