32 Quotes by James Meredith

When it comes to my rights as an American citizen, and yours, I am a triumphalist and an absolutist. Anything less is an insult,

My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.

Nothing is a bigger waste of time than regretting the past and worrying about the future.

Do you know who the real hypocrite is? It's the federal government and the Justice Department. It's a fraud; it's a lie. They have no interest in the education of black children. They are only interested in the politics of it.

My statue at Ole Miss is a false idol. And it wasn't put there for my benefit. It was put there for Ole Miss and Mississippi.

I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

Do you know how big of an insult that is to me - to say that I had to be brave to confront some ignorant white folks?

My great-grandfather was the last ruler of the Choctaw Nation, and from birth, I was taught that my role was to restore the power and the glory to my bloodline.