Quotes By Jesse Jackson

If you don't know what tomorrow holds, you need to know who holds tomorrow!

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

We've been so preoccupied with getting the government to behave in a fair and democratic way, we were not able to focus on the private sector where most of the jobs are, where most of the wealth and opportunities are.

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.

There's great disparity between who goes to college and who goes to jail. Who lives long and who dies prematurely, is the defining issue of our time. And I submit to you, there's a significant race dimension, it is basically class-driven.

You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate.

I came to the conclusion that in order to end racial barriers, I needed to run for the office of the president and put forth an agenda of social justice and world peace. In addition, I concluded that someone needed to run and challenge the liberal orthodoxy.

So many bright stars, bright in life, burn out quickly.

The American people on the ground need a clearer, stronger, Lyndon B. Johnson-type voice from their president.

In tough economic times, desperate people do desperate things, and the abortion rate goes up.

Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.

I'm too mature to be angry.

Those powers that control the tent are not threatened at all by any activity that you engage in, in the shadows, that's not moving toward the tent. And I am rather convinced that we have a generation that is so preoccupied with life in the shadows, they never even focus on getting to the sunlight where you open up the big tent.

I mean, the fight for a health care bill to cover all Americans and leave none behind is attacked as being a race appeal, which is not true, but then it's put out in the media as true.

At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.

I was extended secret service protection during my presidential run in 1984, when I received the most death threats ever made toward a candidate.

Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

The great responsibility that we have today is to put the poor and the near poor back on front of the American agenda.

Deliberation and debate is the way you stir the soul of our democracy.

I had to steal to survive.

When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.

If the states had to vote on slavery, we would have lost the vote.

Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.

I have worked hard to build relationships between Jewish people and black people.

A man must be willing to die for justice. Death is an inescapable reality and men die daily, but good deeds live forever.

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

A check or credit card, a Gucci bag strap, anything of value will do. Give as you live.

We have to judge politicians by their cumulative score. In one innings they make a great catch, in another they drop the ball. In one they score a home run, in another they strike out. But it is their cumulative batting average that we are interested in.