Minority Quotes

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil. (Norman Mailer)
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. View quote
Ayn Rand
I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking. View quote
A. A. Milne
I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle. View quote
Marilyn Monroe
The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium. View quote
Arthur C. Clarke
I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority. View quote
Barney Frank
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror. View quote
Peter Kropotkin
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. View quote
Ralph W. Sockman
There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure. View quote
Barbara Jordan
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole. (Arnold J. Toynbee)
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in the minds of men. View quote
Samuel Adams
How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country. View quote
Dean Acheson
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else. View quote
Gwendolyn Brooks
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. View quote
Eric Hoffer
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
Democracy cannot survive without the guidance of a creative minority. View quote
Harlan F. Stone
Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don't have large minority groups. View quote
Aleksander Kwasniewski
I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion. View quote
Andrew Greeley
At the very top state institutions, like UCLA, Berkeley and the University of Texas, however, the trend of downward minority enrollment remains persistent and discouraging. View quote
Adam Schiff
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the "still small voice" within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority. (Mahatma Gandhi)
If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority. View quote
Francis Crick
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. View quote
Ayn Rand
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). View quote
Ayn Rand