Quotes about minorities

A minority is always compelled to think. That is the blessing of being in the minority.

— Leo Baeck

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

— James Baldwin

Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is always the minorities that hold the key of progress.

— Raymond B. Fosdick

A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

— Eric Hoffer

A minority may be right, and a majority is always wrong.

— Henrik Ibsen

Niggerization is the result of oppression -- and it doesn't just apply to the black people. Old people, poor people, and students can also get niggerized.

— Florynce R. Kennedy

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion... while truth again reverts to a new minority.

— Søren Kierkegaard

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

— Walter Lippmann

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

— Norman Mailer

Beware the tyranny of the minority.

— Latin Proverb

How a minority, reaching majority, seizing authority, hates a minority!

— Leonard H. Robbins

No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

— Susan Sontag

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

— Henry David Thoreau

You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.

— Woodrow T. Wilson