Randall Robinson Quotes & Sayings

I don't know of any situation where you're going to have an officeholder in a country of eight million people who's cut off at the knees by the most powerful force in this world and who can still make it fly. — Randall Robinson

Like slavery, other human rights crimes have resulted in the loss of millions of lives. But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharp choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended. — Randall Robinson

I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ. — Randall Robinson

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. — Randall Robinson

Where does a black soul go to rest? — Randall Robinson

I've always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I've worked with over my career with whom I've not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person. — Randall Robinson

Son, you won't need to talk to my headstone in order to talk to me. I won't be there. I'll be in the air and the Earth. I'll be in the stars that light the African heavens. I'll be watchin' over you and your family. My spirit will always be close enough to touch and protect you all. So, do not grieve for me. My body will die, but my soul will live on. For my soul cannot die. Always remember that my soul is the spark of God in me. — Randall Robinson

I've never had any trouble opposing people I've been close to. I've never worried about offending or bothering people I feel strongly about. — Randall Robinson

Americans don't bother to notice anybody else in the world. — Randall Robinson

The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery. — Randall Robinson

In the animated Dreamworks movie Prince of Egypt the ancient Egyptians are drawn to appear more Arab than African. But the ancient Egyptians came originally from Africa's interior to the south. They were not Arabs, not people from Arabia, but indigenous Africans. Egyptian civilization was thousands of years old by the time the Arabs, with a modest army under General 'Amr ibn as- 'As, entered in December of 639 A.D. — Randall Robinson

Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people. — Randall Robinson

Condelleza Rice and Colin Powell are both dangerous people. What they did in Haiti [2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide] is a good measure of it. They destroyed a democracy. They squelched loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank. They did everything behind the scenes, including arming the thugs that came to overrun the country. They're frauds. — Randall Robinson

Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation's history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God. — Randall Robinson

One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. — Randall Robinson

But the differences between the two races, especially that of colour, led Jefferson to advocate the total removal of the Negroes, after emancipation, "beyond the reach of mixture." My dear Miss Sally Hemings, has the man no shame? — Randall Robinson

I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion. — Randall Robinson

I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied. — Randall Robinson

Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. — Randall Robinson

I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life. — Randall Robinson

We've been taught in America that big is best. That's why people have to believe that they must live in the greatest country in the world, which is absolutely idiotic. — Randall Robinson

Bush people didn't like him, and they never liked him. They didn't like him because they don't like democracy. They like you to have an election, but they like you to elect the people they want you to elect. — Randall Robinson

People need their history like they need air and food. — Randall Robinson

I can't think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he's the worst American President of all time. — Randall Robinson

I've opposed black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and rightist regimes. I'm close to Aristide because I have respect for him, but all that is beside the point. — Randall Robinson

You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don't water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don't water, nineteen will die and one will survive. — Randall Robinson

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon.
Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all.
These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon. — Randall Robinson

Reagan was conservative, but he didn't approach global management with an unbending religious zeal. — Randall Robinson

We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths. — Randall Robinson

Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up. — Randall Robinson

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. — Randall Robinson

I think people involved with institutions find it harder to know the time to go than the time to come. — Randall Robinson

I'm aware that because America is so powerful - with its tentacles reaching out to the world - one doesn't escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life. — Randall Robinson

You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. — Randall Robinson

What then was I doing visiting George Washington's Mount Vernon many years ago with Hazel? Confused? Confessedly. How can any American who isn't white not be? — Randall Robinson

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison. — Randall Robinson

Democracy requires that if you who don't like the outcome of elections you have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the next time around. — Randall Robinson

Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness — Randall Robinson

For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board. — Randall Robinson

Unbalanced power poisons introspection. In its vacated space lay living society's imperative questions, unseen, unphrased, unasked, unanswered. — Randall Robinson

I think the business community knows that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the scramble for what remains. — Randall Robinson