Andrew Young famous quotes

Influence is like a savings account, the less you use it, the more you've got
-- Andrew Young

#Saving #Use #Influence

He [Martin Luther King Jr.] always used to say you have no choice about being born or dying. The only thing you have a choice about is what you die for.
-- Andrew Young

#Kings #Choices #Dying

In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.
-- Andrew Young

#Change #Achievement #Black History

We rise in glory as we sink in pride.
-- Andrew Young

#Pride #Glory

It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.
-- Andrew Young

#Blessing #African American #Causes

Everybody is determined by his own experience.
-- Andrew Young

#Determined

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.
-- Andrew Young

#Nonsense #Preacher #Make Sense

Wishing of all strategies, is the worst.
-- Andrew Young

#Wish #Strategy #Worst

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Differences #Athletic #Sportsmanship

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.
-- Andrew Young

#Power #Insomnia #Use

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
-- Andrew Young

#Business #Virtue #Hundred

I have about concluded that wealth is a state of mind, and that anyone can acquire a wealthy state of mind by thinking rich thoughts.
-- Andrew Young

#Thinking #Mind #Wealth

My hope for my children must be that they respond to the still, small voice of God in their own hearts.
-- Andrew Young

#Children #Heart #Voice

I would define morality as enlightened self-interest...That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.
-- Andrew Young

#Self #Moral #Manners

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

#War #Thinking #Racism

I believe in humanitarian capitalism, and there are good people on Wall Street.
-- Andrew Young

#Wall #Believe #People

Freedom is a struggle, and we do it together. Not only together as black citizens, but black and white together.
-- Andrew Young

#Struggle #Black And White #Together

For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.
-- Andrew Young

#Rights #Luxury #Political

Do not try to live your children's lives out of your own frustrations.
-- Andrew Young

#Children #Frustration #Trying

In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.
-- Andrew Young

#Intelligent #People #Moral

Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That's what I've been doing all my life.
-- Andrew Young

#Life #Rights #People

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

#Effort #Decision #Action

We think it is complicated to change the world. Change comes little by little. Nothing worthwhile can happen in one generation.
-- Andrew Young

#Inspirational #Thinking #Generations

There is a happy land, Far, far away, Where Saints in glory stand, Bright, bright as day.
-- Andrew Young

#Land #Saint #Glory

The man with courage is a majority.
-- Andrew Young

#Courage #Men #Majority

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.
-- Andrew Young

#Luxury #Bed #Kingdoms

Both the brightness and the spectrum of the X-rays are very different from what theory predicts.
-- Andrew Young

#Rays #Different #Brightness

The commercialization of sport is the democratization of sport.
-- Andrew Young

#Sports

I had to get a second passport in a hurry.
-- Andrew Young

#Passports

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.
-- Andrew Young

#Thinking #White #Black

Beauty and love are all my dream; They change not with the changing day; Love stays forever like a stream That flows but never flows away;
-- Andrew Young

#Dream #Famous Love #Forever

When the long, varnished buds of beech Point out beyond their reach, And tanned by summer suns Leaves of bright bryony turn bronze, And gossamer floats bright and wet From trees that are their own sunset, Spring, summer, autumn I come here, And what is there to fear? And yet I never lose the feeling That someone else behind is stealing Or else in front has disappeared; Though nothing I have seen or heard, Makes me still walk beneath these boughs With cautious step as in a haunted house.
-- Andrew Young

#Summer #Spring #Sunset

Slavery didnt break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.
-- Andrew Young

#Black #Slavery #Welfare

Violence is not more efficient than non-violence.
-- Andrew Young

#Violence #Non Violence

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Rights #Long #Voting

Martin Luther King said America had given a bad check to black people.
-- Andrew Young

#Kings #Race #America

Nike has always been a business about excellence and achievement.
-- Andrew Young

#Nike #Achievement #Excellence

You have to expect that if you cuss out the world, The world is going to cuss back.
-- Andrew Young

#World

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.
-- Andrew Young

#Society #Secrecy #Diplomacy

I call upon both Republicans and Democrats to work with us to have a national ID card that is free and accessible. President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King recognized was the greatest step for society was that short step into the voting booth. If we are to be true to their courage and conviction, we must make that short step as easy as possible. Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.
-- Andrew Young

#Kings #Hands #Land

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Life #Dream #Believe

The unsung heroes of the civil rights movement were always the wives and the mothers.
-- Andrew Young

#Mother #Hero #Rights

Any racial reconciliation we've had in this country has come not out of confrontation but out of a spirit of reconciliation. If we continue to practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we'll eventually end up with a land of people who are blind and toothless.
-- Andrew Young

#Country #Eye #Land

Nobody black had learned anything from the Letter from the Birmingham Jail or from the I Have a Dream speech. That was a revelation of white people.
-- Andrew Young

#Dream #White #Jail

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Good Life #Thinking #Parent

No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.
-- Andrew Young

#Islands #Sea #People

Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.
-- Andrew Young

#Hands #Land #Cards

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Soldier #President #Citizens

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.
-- Andrew Young

#Diplomacy #Copiers #Xerox

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

#Wisdom #Views #Looks

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.
-- Andrew Young

#Children #Reason #Crime

If I hadn't been so outspoken, Jimmy Carter wouldn't have wanted me.
-- Andrew Young

#Outspoken #Carter #Wanted

I've been dyslexic and had Attention Deficit Disorder at some time in my life. I still read with a highlighter, but I've always loved to read.
-- Andrew Young

#Attention #Disorder #Deficit

I wouldn't listen to my parents, but I found out that I absorbed. I never heard what they said - told me - but I did what they did.
-- Andrew Young

#Parent #Found #Said

I tried. But not everybody thought so.
-- Andrew Young

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

#People #Want

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.
-- Andrew Young

#Rights #Movement #Lessons

What Iran wants and what North Korea wants is respect.
-- Andrew Young

#Iran #Korea #Want

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Believe #Rights #August

We were trying to transform America, not triumph over white folk.
-- Andrew Young

#America #White #Justice

Can wealth give happiness? look around and see, what gay distress! what splendid misery! Whatever fortunes lavishly can pour, the mind annihilates and calls for more.
-- Andrew Young

#Gay #Giving #Mind

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.
-- Andrew Young

#School #Kids #College

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.
-- Andrew Young

#War #America #Railroads

There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working... for my own concerns. I have always had people advise me on what to say, but never on what not to say.
-- Andrew Young

#People #United States #Roles

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Thinking #Ideas #Two

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Military #Army #Democracy

Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.
-- Andrew Young

#Children #Taken #Ideas

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Gun #Men #Years

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.
-- Andrew Young

#Running #Kings #Writing

I was much more comfortable and a much better congressman running in a district that was 37 percent black, where I had to have a white constituency to get elected, than I would have been if I was in a 75 percent black district.
-- Andrew Young

#Running #White #Black

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

#Smart #Mad #Way