Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched?
— Mamie Till
Uplifting Lynch quotations
America's greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynching, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem.
If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.
I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
The content of your character is your choice.
Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.
Although lynchings have steadily increased in number and barbarity during the last twenty years, there has been no single effort put forth by the many moral and philanthropic forces of the country to put a stop to this wholesale slaughter.
As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.
Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.
The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.
I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back.
My legs and feet were not hurting, that is a stereotype. I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated. I was not going back.
I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan;
as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.
I grew up in Colorado - went back there, tried to heal myself and grow and learn, then got a call that David Lynch wanted me to fly back to Seattle so he could meet me for Twin Peaks.
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.
Our country's national crime is lynching.
It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.
If mob law is going to rule, better dismiss, judge, sheriff, etc.
, and let's all take chances alike. I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln [New Mexico.] Advise persons never to engage in killing.
But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome.
I guess now would be a good time to tell you," He said. "I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.
We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them.
Once the facts are clear the decisions jump out at you.
American civil rights leader, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Lynching is a murder. For the past four hundred years our people have been lynched physically, but now it's done politically. We're lynched politically, we're lynched economically, we're lynched socially, we're lynched in every way that you can imagine.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.
In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.
People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.
I wanted to go to Jupiter. That was my plan from day one, and David Lynch gave me the ticket.
As soon as someone like me or David Lynch pops up everyone says hallelujah, how weird.
Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off;
David Lynch is interested in the ear.
Lynching is color line murder.
One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.
The typical big winner in the Lynch portfolio generally takes three to ten years to play out.
The place looks like where David Lynch would meet Beaver Cleaver's mom for secret afternoons of bondage and milkshakes.
And the fact that Emmett Till, a young black man, could be found floating down the river in Mississippi, as, indeed, many had been done over the years, this set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.
It is the English, not their Government;
for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors.