Gerald Early

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

— Gerald Early

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball.

— Gerald Early

The Miss America contest is the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.

— Gerald Early

Kwanzaa's success depends on exacerbating consciously or unconsciously, black people's sense of alienation from Christmas. With its fat white man who delivers toys and gifts to children, Christmas simply confirms many African Americans' perception that everything in American society reinforces the idea of white supremacy.

— Gerald Early