Top 160 Jesse Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Obama used to be a community organizer. He knows how to build communities.”

— Jesse Jackson

102. “When we do in Grenada what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, we lose moral authority and credibility.”

— Jesse Jackson

103. “Humanitarian appeals always help. They penetrate deeper than political tradeoffs.”

— Jesse Jackson

104. “Those who have the most wealth and the most property, their children have the first, the best, and the most.”

— Jesse Jackson

105. “Black and Jewish leaders have been a coalition of conscience.”

— Jesse Jackson

106. “Most blacks will argue that they excel because of hard work, because of intellect, determination, sweat, blood, tears and risk.”

— Jesse Jackson

107. “A man who cannot be enticed by money or intimidated by the threat of jail or death has two of the strongest weapons that anyone has to offer.”

— Jesse Jackson

108. “Each time a barrier falls for one person, the doors of opportunity open wider for every other American.”

— Jesse Jackson

109. “Iraq will drive American agenda for a long time because Iraq policy has so damaged America in the Middle East region, left us isolated. We are there now by brute strength, we are not there because we are desired.”

— Jesse Jackson

110. “If you think black people have a motivation problem, open up a Wal-Mart and advertise a thousand jobs. Watch 5,000 people show up.”

— Jesse Jackson

111. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

112. “If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.”

— Jesse Jackson

113. “In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don’t have a plan for reconstruction at home.”

— Jesse Jackson

114. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

115. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

116. “You know, people’d always ask ‘Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?’ They never seen the house I’m running from.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

118. “I want to make America better!”

— Jesse Jackson

119. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

120. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

121. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

122. “Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns, they simply are unaccountable. They’re free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.”

— Jesse Jackson

123. “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.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

125. “In many ways Africa subsidised America and Europe’s development.”

— Jesse Jackson

126. “In order for an ideal to become a reality, there must be a person, a personality to translate it.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

128. “So here we are today with a new conversation. When University of Georgia plays Georgia Tech, it’s uniform color versus skin color. We have – we’ve overcome that level of racial fear.”

— Jesse Jackson

129. “Those in blue suits who use thinly veiled race symbols – when they say welfare and crime and three strikes and anti- affirmative action – they are sending messages more profound their language.”

— Jesse Jackson

130. “Statehood for the District of Columbia is the most important civil rights and social justice issue in America today.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

132. “We must give the American worker the first option of ownership.”

— Jesse Jackson

133. “If I were a white candidate, I’d have won the Democratic nomination.”

— Jesse Jackson

134. “For me, Barack Obama’s election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.”

— Jesse Jackson

135. “In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.”

— Jesse Jackson

136. “I take my role seriously as a pastor.”

— Jesse Jackson

137. “We went across the South on Super Tuesday without a single catcall or boo, without a single ugly sign. Not until we got to New York and the North did the litmus test of race and religion spout from the mouths of public officials.”

— Jesse Jackson

138. “When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.”

— Jesse Jackson

139. “I know how to run a nationally paced campaign.”

— Jesse Jackson

140. “The charges that I am anti-Semitic are simply erroneous, felonious, and unceremonious. In fact, when I need a doctor, I always look for one with a Jewish name.”

— Jesse Jackson

141. “From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.”

— Jesse Jackson

142. “We picked their cotton. We cooked their food. We nursed their babies. Now we can run their cities. We can run their states. We will run the country.”

— Jesse Jackson

143. “When you create more small businesses, you create small entrepreneurship. Out of that comes self-determination and employment.”

— Jesse Jackson

144. “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”

— Jesse Jackson

145. “I’ve paid my dues. I’ve earned your votes. Send me.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

147. “At the end of the day, we’re defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.”

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Jesse Jackson

149. “Ronald Reagan was older than I was when he ran for president.”

— Jesse Jackson

150. “I must oppose the use of federal funds for a policy of killing infants.”

— Jesse Jackson