Barbara Jordan
Barbara Jordan
Barbara Charline Jordanwas a lawyer, educator, an American politician, and a leader of the Civil Rights movement. A Democrat, she was the first African American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction, the first Southern African American female elected to the United States House of Representatives, the first known lesbian elected to the United States Congress, and the first African-American woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth21 February 1936
CityHouston, TX
CountryUnited States of America
Barbara Jordan quotes about
[It is] one of the most complex and emotional issues of out time.
We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present: unemployment, inflation... but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America.
We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic. There is no way to improve upon that. But what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.
In other times, I could stand here and give this kind of exposition on the beliefs of the Democratic Party and that would be enough. But today that is not enough. People want more.
If you had to work in the environment of Washington, D.C., as I do, and watch those men who are so imprisoned and so confined by their eighteenth-century thought patterns, you would know that if anybody is going to be liberated, it's men who must be liberated in this country.
We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear. King Hussein Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. - Thomas Jefferson We have made mistakes. In our haste to do all things for all people, we did not foresee the full consequences of our actions. And when the people raised their voices, we didn't hear. But our deafness was only a temporary condition, and not an irreversible condition.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker's child to miss school in order to earn...just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.
The Supreme Court has always been the last bastion of the protection of our freedoms.
I never wanted to be run of the mill.
Things which matter cost money, and we've got to spend the money if we do not want to have generations of parasites rather than generations of productive citizens.
The stakes ... are too high for government to be a spectator sport.
If you're going to play the game [politics] properly, you'd better know every rule.
We believe that the people are the source of all governmental power; that the authority of the people is to be extended, not restricted.