Quotes By Al Sharpton

I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag.

James Brown became my father. He would talk to me the way a father talked to a son. He became the father I never had.

I've never done anything else in my life other than preach and be an activist. Way before I was known.

The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.

Evangelicals catapulted George W. Bush back to the White House.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

I've seen too much in life to give up.

I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.

My ministry's always been one of social activism. I think a responsible minister must be at some levels involved in the social order.

How do you make things fair?

I won vice president of my student body in high school. That doesn't mean anything.

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.

One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children's childhoods is that I'm having my first childhood myself.

We need an amendment that gives us the right to vote protected by the federal government and the Constitution.

If O.J. had been accused of killing his black wife, you would not have seen the same passion stirred up.

Dr. King used Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance.

If you can get the proper definition of trouble, then we can find out who the real troublemakers are.

I was the first candidate to come out against this war, spoke at every anti-war march.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

The boxing world is full of all kinds of corruption.

I'm a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Bill Clinton strikes me as the kind of guy who goes wherever the polls lead him, rather than leading the polls.

Who defines terrorists? Today's terrorist is tomorrow's friend.

I do believe the Democratic party has moved far to the right. I do believe that the party has a bunch of elephants running around in donkey clothes.

The United States government has the obligation to educate all young people in this country.

We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances.

It seems some have chosen to ignore or have simply forgotten the big-picture vision promoted by Dr. King and his kin.

I've seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.

I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.