Quotes About Second Class Citizens

“Forty-two years after Dr. King was murdered, we are still a nation of inequality. People of color, women, gays, lesbians, and others are still treated as second-class citizens. Yes, things have changed but we have still not achieved equality among all humans. And nonhuman animals continue to be chattel property without any inherent value.”

— Gary L. Francione

“This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America”

— Paul Robeson

“In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination
tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination”

— Betty Friedan

“Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.”

— Dinesh D'Souza

“Those who are not free to live as they choose are second class citizens. The weak will lose everything to the strong, even their lives.”

— Naoyuki Ochiai

“Women in Jesus' day were less than second-class citizens.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

“Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.”

— John Doar

“So we are all black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves.”

— Malcolm X

“Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?”

— Kim Gordon

“The days of humiliation, of second-class citizens and of inequality are over and gone forever.”

— Gerry Adams

“We know no document is perfect, but when we amend the Constitution, it would be to expand rights, not to take away rights from decent, loyal Americans. This great Constitution of ours should never be used to make a group of Americans permanent second-class citizens.”

— Barbara Boxer

“No longer should women be denied the right to vote, no longer should women be treated as second class citizens, no longer should women not be allowed to be a citizen at all.”

— Ginny Brown-Waite

“My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted.”

— Mike Shinoda

“I remember my grandfather believed women were second-class citizens and told my mother that it was a shame she had brains because she was a girl and shouldn't carry on her education.”

— Sarah Gavron

“Let us walk into the conference room as equals and not second class citizens.”

— Martin McGuinness

“Those who deny the existence of a supreme being have been turned into second-class citizens by a government that continuously sends messages that 'real Americans' believe in God.”

— Michael Newdow

“What I said was that in a democratic society, people must be permitted to make their choices and that the choices of women should not be subordinate to the choices of men, otherwise women are less than equal, are second-class citizens.”

— Dennis Kucinich

“The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.”

— Wendell Willkie

“Beautiful' is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we're second-class citizens.”

— Jessica Valenti

“We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.”

— Dora Russell

“People don't do good work when they feel like losers and are second-class citizens within their own company.”

— Jonah Peretti

“I am very proud I was part of the IRA in Derry and involved in repelling the designs of the British state forces against people who were being treated as second- and third-class citizens.”

— Martin McGuinness

“I believed that, in a situation where the community that I came from were being treated like second- and third-class citizens, that I had a responsibility to fight back against it. And I don't apologise to anybody for having done that. I think it was the right thing to do.”

— Martin McGuinness

“Many Japanese families moved to Taiwan during the occupation. Then, when the war ended, they were forced to move back. And at the macro level, the Taiwanese had every reason to cheer when the Japanese left. The Japanese military could often be incredibly brutal. The Taiwanese lived as second-class citizens on their own land.”

— Gene Luen Yang

“Women are still second-class citizens.”

— Joan Jett

“When I was a kid and going to the movies I was overwhelmed by the way women were always second-class citizens in the film.”

— Brit Marling

“Told reporters Wednesday he can support a pathway to citizenship for some of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and that he actually prefers it to a plan that would create a second-class of citizens through alternative programs.”

— Darrell Issa

“In the kingdom of God there are no second-class citizens.”

— David S. Baxter

“We became a congresswoman, a stay-at-home mom, a filmmaker, and a journalist. And Lino and I taught our children that they could rise to even greater heights. They could become surgeons, CEOs, supreme court justices, secretary of state, and even president of the United States. We didn't teach our daughters that they were second-class citizens.”

— Diana DeGette

“Too often girls accept that of course the boys will get better lighting and seating at their sports events, of course the football team will get more attention, privileges, and space in the yearbook. We need to teach girls to look around and notice when they're being treated like second-class citizens, and then to insist on equal treatment.”

— Mariah Nelson

“Like the panic stricken populace of 'The War of the Worlds' and countless other 1950s invasion movies, the victims are there to provide the human ground over which monster and expert, threat and defender, disordering and ordering impulses can battle it out. Second-class citizens of the genre, they are narratively indispensable because physically entirely disposable. We are only really involved with them in the momentary tension of their capture or demise.”

— Andrew Tudor

“We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens. I am sick and tired of the American citizen being demeaned and treated as a second-class citizen while anybody who crosses the border is treated as the most virtuous human being on the face of the earth.”

— Mark Levin

“The reality is that the people that we represent are no longer going to be second-class citizens in their own country.”

— Martin McGuinness

“It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens. I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people - like all human beings - are born equal in dignity and rights.”

— George Clooney

“The land on which they (the Founding Fathers) formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we've torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it's ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”

— Melissa Harris-Perry

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.”

— Haile Selassie

“We all agree that marriage is a fundamental right. And in our country, and in our society, there are no second-class citizens.”

— Bill T. Jones

“While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.”

— Bob Hawke

“Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.”

— Northrop Frye

“Our government treats the LGBT community like second-class citizens.”

— Cindy McCain

“If you do not learn English in this country, you cannot get anywhere. We are in America. We are not in Mexico, we are not in China, we are not in Saudi Arabia - we speak English in this country! And what bilingual education does, is keep them from learning English, so they are doomed to be second-class citizens.”

— Rafael Cruz

“I don't want to involve myself in the various arguments about why Israel was created ... I want to deal with the situation at hand which is the ongoing killing on both sides ... It's true that there's also much oppression of Palestinians in Arab countries, where Palestinians aren't allowed to vote or own property and are treated as second class citizens and pawns in the fight against Israel. But I'm not going to spend my time on this since there is isn't a whole lot I can do about it.”

— Michael Moore

“Of all second-class citizens, neurotics are the only ones who are so by choice.”

— Mignon McLaughlin

“If we were second class citizens we'd be driving old Cadillacs and living good. If we were first class we'd be driving a Rolls Royce.”

— Muhammad Ali

“I am very interested in the enlightenment of women. Very few teachers of advanced self discovery work with women, and if they do it's usually in a very second handed way. They treat women as second class citizens.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Human beings are hardwired by however many millions or billions of years to orient toward their own survival. That's why we're tribal people. That's why we're prejudiced people.
That's why we treat women as second-class citizens, that's why we are homophobic, and that's why we make religion a weapon to prove we're superior to other people.”

— John Shelby Spong

“Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture.”

— Geena Davis

“Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.”

— William Styron

“I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.”

— Marge Piercy