Top 66 Affirmative Quotes

Here’s the point – you’re looking at affirmative action, and you’re looking at marijuana. You legalize marijuana, no need for quotas, because really, who’s gonna wanna work?

There’s been the same kind of demonizing of the word ‘feminism’ as words like ‘liberal,’ ‘affirmative action,’ and so on.

The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.

Let’s be clear about one thing everyone should know: Affirmative action is constitutional.

I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I’ve changed my mind. And I’ve publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

When Congress exercises the powers delegated to it by the Constitution, it may impose affirmative obligations on executive and judicial officers of state and local governments as well as ordinary citizens.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action – to try to balance out those effects.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn’t able to succeed at those institutions.

Until affirmative action is described and understood as one mechanism by which to make amends for historical wrongdoing against members of marginalized communities, it will fail to meaningfully address the inequality that exists as a direct result of federal policy.

I answer in the affirmative with an emphatic ‘No.’

I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

To be sure Plato did not favor ‘affirmative action’ to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

Democracy is not what we don’t want. Democracy is what we do want. It is a set of affirmative values by which we can move forward. If we cannot insert our values into our vote, and our vote is simply against what we fear most, then we are a ship lost at sea.

There is strong mentoring of women in the academy. Corporations appear more willing to resist affirmative action to advance women, and boards and shareholders are more tolerant of this approach.

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‘O.K.’ has deposed the more affirmative ‘Yes,’ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‘like’ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.

America has granted every wish of black Americans. It has made government the head of the black family; it has integrated the schools and neighborhoods; it has given blacks welfare and affirmative action; it has even apologized through Bill Clinton. There is simply nothing else that America can or should do.

In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, ‘A measure by which white men are discriminated against,’ and I got so mad.

You have to give access to people with disabilities but there is no requirement to hire them. What I mean by affirmative obligation is that producers must take the necessary steps to include opportunities for people with disabilities and a vast majority of them do.

Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women.

I think it’s worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

You’ll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I’ve written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.

If you don’t like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I’m talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap.

Republicans can be a funny bunch. They’re against affirmative action, but they always seem to be able to find people of color to fill a slot just when they’re most needed.

A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass.

Affirmative action makes employers think, ‘Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard ’cause they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C’s in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.’

Many progressives understand Scalia, and other conservative judges, in crassly political terms – as opponents of affirmative action, abortion, gun control, and campaign finance legislation. But what Scalia cared most about was clear, predictable rules, laid down in advance.

What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.

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

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination… Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change.

Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong – wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

I don’t want affirmative action – too much affirmative, not enough action.

Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.

There’s a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we’ve arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.

And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

At the core of ‘Star Trek’ is Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

We hold that an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer’s conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn’t work.