Top 50 John Howard Griffin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Every fool in error can find a passage of scripture to back him up.”

— John Howard Griffin

2. “Existence nullified by men; reaffirmed by nature.”

— John Howard Griffin

3. “Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”

— John Howard Griffin

4. “He who is less than just is less than man.”

— John Howard Griffin

5. “We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it.”

— John Howard Griffin

6. “Fear dims even the sunlight.”

— John Howard Griffin

7. “If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.”

— John Howard Griffin

8. “This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed.”

— John Howard Griffin

9. “It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.”

— John Howard Griffin

10. “I’m annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.”

— John Howard Griffin

11. “Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are not essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”

— John Howard Griffin

12. “In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We – one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.”

— John Howard Griffin

13. “A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.”

— John Howard Griffin

14. “Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty.”

— John Howard Griffin

15. “If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.”

— John Howard Griffin

16. “He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us.”

— John Howard Griffin

17. “He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. “And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll.” A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. “What do you think of that?” “Surely some refuse,” I suggested cautiously. “Not if they want to eat – or feed their kids,” he snorted. “If they don’t put out, they don’t get the job.”

— John Howard Griffin

18. “If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.”

— John Howard Griffin

19. “Now you go into oblivion.”

— John Howard Griffin

20. “When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of ‘benign neglect,’ how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.”

— John Howard Griffin

21. “We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk, were suddenly elevated in status by this man’s misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor.”

— John Howard Griffin

22. “We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice – and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic – we show our prejudice in our paternalism – we downgrade their dignity.”

— John Howard Griffin

23. “We’ve reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy.”

— John Howard Griffin

24. “This system of discrimination, an inculcated double standard, may vary in content from culture to culture, but it is always unjust. There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice – equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.”

— John Howard Griffin

25. “He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.”

— John Howard Griffin

26. “You can’t get around what’s right, though,” he said. “When we stop loving them, that’s when they win.”

— John Howard Griffin

27. “The vast difference between what this country was saying and apparently believing, and what the black man was experiencing, was embittering.”

— John Howard Griffin

28. “Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the “good white leading the poor black out of the jungle.” Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to “bringing them up to our level,” without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be.”

— John Howard Griffin

29. “All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.”

— John Howard Griffin

30. “Phew!” His small blue eyes shone with repugnance, a look of such unreasoning contempt for my skin that it filled me with despair. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation – not of myself but of all men who were black like me.”

— John Howard Griffin

31. “He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.”

— John Howard Griffin

32. “If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given.”

— John Howard Griffin

33. “The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years – the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt – was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all.”

— John Howard Griffin

34. “He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.”

— John Howard Griffin

35. “They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.” Others.”

— John Howard Griffin

36. “The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places.”

— John Howard Griffin

37. “To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.”

— John Howard Griffin

38. “We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint-some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we’ll never have the right answers...”

— John Howard Griffin

39. “In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical “accident” – rather than by who he is in his humanity.”

— John Howard Griffin

40. “A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called “black separatists” were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.”

— John Howard Griffin

41. “Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their “good black people.” And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions?”

— John Howard Griffin

42. “I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.”

— John Howard Griffin

43. “The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices.”

— John Howard Griffin

44. “A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.”

— John Howard Griffin

45. “Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from “winning,” even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race. I.”

— John Howard Griffin

46. “Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.”

— John Howard Griffin

47. “Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group. Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover.”

— John Howard Griffin

48. “We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.”

— John Howard Griffin

49. “The core concept in Griffin’s writings about racism – that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and “as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture” – was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, “The Intrinsic Other.”

— John Howard Griffin

50. “Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities of the North, the very officials who had praised him sometimes led opposition to his work locally.”

— John Howard Griffin