My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.
I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.
I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.
When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.
I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.
Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.
I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.
Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.
I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
No opposing quotes found.