Top 50 Clint Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.”

— Clint Smith

2. “It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ’discovered ignorance.”

— Clint Smith

3. “We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.”

— Clint Smith

4. “Tell me, at what velocity does joy travel?”

— Clint Smith

5. “Writing a book is a humbling experience because you’ll spend a day reading an entire book just to write one good paragraph.”

— Clint Smith

6. “There is enormous value in providing young people with the language, the history, and the framework to identify why their society looks the way it does.”

— Clint Smith

7. “So much of the story we tell ourselves about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throughout our lives we are told certain stories and they are stories that we choose to believe – stories that become in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of.”

— Clint Smith

8. “At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.”

— Clint Smith

9. “Quote from David, the tour guide: There’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory. I think that history is the story of the past, using all available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is a blend of history and a little bit of emotion. History is about what you need to know... but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”

— Clint Smith

10. “When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path.”

— Clint Smith

11. “I think my generation,” she said, “many getting killed, and beaten, and spit on, and dogs, and hoses, did not understand that you have to keep telling the story in order for people to understand. Each generation has to know the story of how we got where we are today, because if you don’t understand, then you are in the position to go back to it.”

— Clint Smith

12. “There’s a chapter in Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said to the five of us, standing in front of the east wing of Jefferson’s manor, “that has some of the most racist things you might ever read, written by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in it. So sometimes I stop and ask myself, “If Gettysburg had gone the wrong way, would people be quoting the Declaration of Independence or Notes on the State of Virginia?” It’s the same guy writing.”

— Clint Smith

13. “The illogic of it all appears to reveal a simple linear truth that is often lost – oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.”

— Clint Smith

14. “Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

— Clint Smith

15. “These heads, renderings of a violent past, are an exhibit at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana – located an hour west of New Orleans, past the brackish estuary of Lake Pontchartrain, through the residue of sugarcane that still sings to the land.”

— Clint Smith

16. “It is not enough to celebrate singular moments of our past or to lift up the legacy of victories that have been won without understanding the effects of those victories – and those losses – on the world around us today.”

— Clint Smith

17. “The Whitney exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten.”

— Clint Smith

18. “The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.”

— Clint Smith

19. “But not enough people spoke about the reasons so many black children grow up communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power that had existed generations before us.”

— Clint Smith

20. “Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today.”

— Clint Smith

21. “Both of the men inscribed words that promoted equality and freedom in the founding documents of the United States while owning other human beings.”

— Clint Smith

22. “When people say ‘Angola is a prison built on a former plantation’ it is often made as an unsettling observation not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery and its inherent violence is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country, black and white, so what would, in any other context, provoke our moral indignation.”

— Clint Smith

23. “Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel – not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.”

— Clint Smith

24. “It is not simply that statues of Lee and other Confederates stand as monuments to a traitorous army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery; it is also that we, US taxpayers, are paying for their maintenance and preservation.”

— Clint Smith

25. “Lineage is a strand of smoke making its way into the sky even though we can’t always tell where it’s coming from, even though sometimes we can’t distinguish the smoke from the sky itself.”

— Clint Smith

26. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.”

— Clint Smith

27. “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now holding people captive through this environmental injustice and devastation.”

— Clint Smith

28. “My grandparents’ stories are my inheritance; each one is an heirloom I carry. Each one is a monument to an era that still courses through my grandfather’s veins. Each story is a memorial that still sits in my grandmother’s bones. My grandparents’ voices are a museum I am still learning how to visit, each conversation with them a new exhibit worthy of my time.”

— Clint Smith

29. “They fight for property and privilege, and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War.”

— Clint Smith

30. “1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War.”

— Clint Smith

31. “How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?”

— Clint Smith

32. “Their work proved successful. Many of the children inundated with these messages spread by the UDC during the early twentieth century would grow up to become the segregationists of the civil rights era, and the legacy of the UDC’s teachings has contributed to the country’s collective ahistoricism and has helped shape the ongoing landscape of white supremacy today.”

— Clint Smith

33. “Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.”

— Clint Smith

34. “He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves.”

— Clint Smith

35. “Instead of purchasing a bed, Norris said, the Department of Corrections found it cheaper to direct the prisoners in the machine and welding shops to build it, with each part of the bed assembled separately. Norris paused, shaking his head at the memory. “One of the guys on the welding crew, his brother was on death row.”

— Clint Smith

36. “Our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives at the expense of the millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.”

— Clint Smith

37. “Historical anthropologist Francois Richard finds it helpful to use a term coined by the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calling Goree a site of ’sincere fiction.”

— Clint Smith

38. “Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideals came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family.”

— Clint Smith

39. “What is a fence if you can fly right over it?”

— Clint Smith

40. “During parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were more enslaved Black people in New York City than in any other urban area across North America. Enslaved workers made up more than a quarter of the city’s labor force. As the city grew. so did the number of enslaved people. As the American Revolution began, about a sixth of New York’s population was of African descent, and almost all of them were enslaved.”

— Clint Smith

41. “Meanwhile, the federal government committed to defending the institution of slavery by officially granting Louisiana statehood, as a slave state, in 1812. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union. In a speech at the time, Louisiana’s commissioner made the state’s priorities clear: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”

— Clint Smith

42. “When I read Jefferson’s disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is.”

— Clint Smith

43. “The violence enacted on Julia’s mother and sister are part of a long history in which black women were seen as both undesirable and sexually objectified. This is the illogic of white supremacy, it does not need intellectual continuity.”

— Clint Smith

44. “There were no flags ornamenting the graves. There were no hourly tours available for people to remember the dead. There was history, but also silence.”

— Clint Smith

45. “It’s not just like, ‘Those overseers were sadistic people. The plantations were morally bankrupt and corrupt.’ Yes, they were. But also, in Europe, once the appetite for sugar and chocolate and coffee and cheap textiles and all these things started flooding the market, and people can finally buy into this larger system of capitalism and consumption, who is at the other end of it?”

— Clint Smith

46. “What he wants is an apology for what happened, and then to have that apology, that reckoning, inform how economic, cultural, and political decisions are made moving forward.”

— Clint Smith

47. “This was not any other conference room. This was the room where the people sentenced to be killed by the State of Louisiana had their final meals. They ate these meals – perhaps a hamburger and french fries, perhaps steak and mashed potatoes, maybe a basket of boiled crawfish and a bowl of gumbo – before being injected with a cocktail that rendered them unconscious, paralyzed their muscles, discontinued their breathing, and stopped their hearts.”

— Clint Smith

48. “Indeed, perhaps the central tension of the Enlightenment is that many of these European thinkers were espousing liberalism, rationalism, and human progress while providing the kindling for slavery and colonialism.”

— Clint Smith

49. “Yes, well, you’re not the same race as many other people in New York, and people’s lived experiences may be different from yours. Your perspective might be valid in your social circle; in other social circles it may not be. That’s all.”

— Clint Smith

50. “The latter point, regarding schools and libraries, was key to understanding the UDC’s collective founding project. Members did not simply want to erect monuments for the fallen; they wanted to rewrite the public narrative. As Cox notes, they saw children as “living monuments” who would go on to defend the principles of states’ rights and white supremacy in ways that no inanimate monument could.”

— Clint Smith