Top 30 Randall Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ.”

— Randall Robinson

2. “Democracy requires that if you who don’t like the outcome of elections you have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the next time around.”

— Randall Robinson

3. “People need their history like they need air and food.”

— Randall Robinson

4. “I think the business community knows that half the world’s oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there’s the scramble for what remains.”

— Randall Robinson

5. “Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.”

— Randall Robinson

6. “You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don’t water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don’t water, nineteen will die and one will survive.”

— Randall Robinson

7. “Where does a black soul go to rest?”

— Randall Robinson

8. “We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.”

— Randall Robinson

9. “I’m aware that because America is so powerful – with its tentacles reaching out to the world – one doesn’t escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life.”

— Randall Robinson

10. “I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.”

— Randall Robinson

11. “One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.”

— Randall Robinson

12. “Until America’s white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people.”

— Randall Robinson

13. “Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.”

— Randall Robinson

14. “I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes – social and economic – are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time.”

— Randall Robinson

15. “Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that’s chewing up.”

— Randall Robinson

16. “I can’t think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he’s the worst American President of all time.”

— Randall Robinson

17. “Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it.”

— Randall Robinson

18. “Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America.”

— Randall Robinson

19. “I’ve always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I’ve worked with over my career with whom I’ve not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person.”

— Randall Robinson

20. “I was really worn down by an American society that is racist, smugly blind to it, and hugely self-satisfied.”

— Randall Robinson

21. “Bush people didn’t like him, and they never liked him. They didn’t like him because they don’t like democracy. They like you to have an election, but they like you to elect the people they want you to elect.”

— Randall Robinson

22. “I’ve opposed black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and rightist regimes. I’m close to Aristide because I have respect for him, but all that is beside the point.”

— Randall Robinson

23. “We’ve been taught in America that big is best. That’s why people have to believe that they must live in the greatest country in the world, which is absolutely idiotic.”

— Randall Robinson

24. “I think people involved with institutions find it harder to know the time to go than the time to come.”

— Randall Robinson

25. “Reagan was conservative, but he didn’t approach global management with an unbending religious zeal.”

— Randall Robinson

26. “I’ve never had any trouble opposing people I’ve been close to. I’ve never worried about offending or bothering people I feel strongly about.”

— Randall Robinson

27. “Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation’s history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God.”

— Randall Robinson

28. “I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.”

— Randall Robinson

29. “Americans don’t bother to notice anybody else in the world.”

— Randall Robinson

30. “It is as if, since its very establishment, America had chosen to hold, as Napoleon would, that “history is the myth that men choose to believe.” The crypto-Machiavellians who serve as the perennial stewards of American public affairs understand that people on the whole are about as malleable as their history can be made to be. The landscape is rife with examples, from historically overarching lies and half-truths to popular culture deceits.”

— Randall Robinson

31. “You try to steer a course in American society that’s not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response.”

— Randall Robinson

32. “Racist behavior in our society is largely static, unnoticed, unremarked, and unconsciously accommodated by Americans of all colors.”

— Randall Robinson

33. “I don’t know of any situation where you’re going to have an officeholder in a country of eight million people who’s cut off at the knees by the most powerful force in this world and who can still make it fly.”

— Randall Robinson

34. “For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.”

— Randall Robinson