Carl Rowan Quotes & Sayings

We must reverse this psychology (of needing guns for home defense). WE can do it by passing a law that says anyone found in possession a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail-period! — Carl T. Rowan

There aren't any embarrassing questions - just embarrassing answers. — Carl T. Rowan

(President Nixon,) in the face of a vote to impeach he might try, as "commander-in-chief", to use military forces to keep himself in power. — Carl T. Rowan

My advice to any diplomat who wants to have good press is to have two or three kids and a dog. — Carl T. Rowan

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. — Carl T. Rowan

The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted. — Richard Rodriguez

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it. — Carl T. Rowan

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history — Carl T. Rowan

A minority group has 'arrived' only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it. — Carl T. Rowan

On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted tuberculosis while serving as a GI in France in Word War I. Houstan always seemed vibrant and impassioned in the chase for justice as he tried to expose his students to everything relating to the law that might give them an advantage.
...
"I never worked hard until I got to the Howard Law School and met Charlie Houston," Marshal told me. "I saw this man's dedication, his vision, his willingness to sacrifice, and I told myself, 'You either shape up or ship out.' When you are being challenged by a great human being, you know that you can't ship out."
So Houston rescued Marshall and launched him into a career as one of the greatest lawyers in American history. — Carl T. Rowan

There are no embarrassing answers-just embarrassing questions. — Carl T. Rowan

The Reagan Administration has fostered a climate in which a barest majority of the Supreme Court caters to the passions and hatreds of the American mob, stripping away the constitutional shield outside our bedrooms ... How tragically ironic that an Administration that promised to get Government "off our backs" is now so active in draping Government gumshoes over every part of our anatomies. — Carl T. Rowan