Quotes By Jesse Jackson

Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.

I cast my bread on the waters long ago. Now it's time for you to send it back to me - toasted and buttered on both sides.

The law protects you from being abused. It doesn't threaten your lifestyle for someone else to have the right to exhibit their lifestyle.

Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.

There is no power in cynicism. There is no forward thrust in cynicism.

Any attempt to dilute my support for Sen. Obama will not succeed.

My very first recollection of life on earth was waking up in bed with my mother, and she was showing me a picture of my father, Charles Jackson, with a group of soldiers.

Black men of integrity cannot make a deal with a politician and leave out the poor of the nation, all God's children.

The relationship between the prophet and the President, the priest and the President, is a sacred one.

Obama used to be a community organizer. He knows how to build communities.

Negroes' problem is that they do not have their egos. That's why our churches end up having a white service, because our preacher is not arrogant enough to take God's word, so he have to go and get some white fellow's agenda and put it in his church.

At the end of the day, we're defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.

When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.

People internalize, from the jail to student loan debt, to credit card debt, to unemployment to the whole collective. It manifests itself in many ways, in people's home lives, domestic stuff.

Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.