Shirley Chisholm Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.

Shirley Chisholm
The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.

Shirley Chisholm
My present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States: it is a beautiful fraud. Practitioners exchange gilded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own, their votes.

Shirley Chisholm
As a black person I am no stranger to prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far more often discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black.

Shirley Chisholm
Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

Shirley Chisholm
As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.

Shirley Chisholm
I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.

Shirley Chisholm
Some fine men are in Congress, too few, trying to do a responsible job. But they are surrounded and almost neutralized by a greater number whose instinct is to make a deal before they make a decision.

Shirley Chisholm
Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.

Shirley Chisholm
Politics as it is practiced in the United States... is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gilded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own, their votes.

Shirley Chisholm
In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — antihumanism.

Shirley Chisholm
My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.

Shirley Chisholm
The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.

Shirley Chisholm
I was well on the way to forming my present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States; it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gelded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own: their votes. And who benefits the most? The lawyers.

Shirley Chisholm