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I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.

Racism springs from the lie that certain human beings are less than fully human. It's a self-centered falsehood that corrupts our minds into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want to be treated.

If you were black, you experienced prejudice. It wasn't a real horrible thing for us; we went through it. We noticed it mostly in the South and in Las Vegas, where we couldn't stay in the hotels where we entertained. But that began to change.

Prejudice is like a hair across your cheek. You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing at it because the feel of it is irritating.

When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark.

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

Anytime you're saying that a person will be thinking one way or another or biased one way or another just based upon race, I just think it's certainly going to be subject to that criticism of racism.

There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.

I don't even know where to start in terms of people having such an issue about color, especially being dark. I just think on different levels it's ignorance; it's no belief, no confidence, it's insecurity, so you want to inflict it on somebody else.