Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

Many of the Jews who owned the homes, the apartments in the black community, we considered them bloodsuckers because they took from our community and built their community but didn't offer anything back to our community.

Of all classes the rich are the most noticed and the least studied.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

In certain corrupt conditions of a State, conspicuous success is more dangerous than failure.

Habitually I go without a vest so that I can’t be accused of standing for the vested interests.

The First Law of Class Warfare: Once inequalities develop, the upper classes can, with relative ease, drastically reduce the probability of success for any equalizing challenges to the system.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

Visibility has an effect on those who are privileged; it brings more privilege, and on those who are marginalized, it brings more marginalization, because it also brings a spotlight onto them where they're at, in the hood or in certain places that are less tolerable.

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots was always blatantly obvious to me, and it's that exact gap that drove me to start writing and pick up a pen. I wanted to explain and understand the world around me because it was easy to see it was corrupted.

There is no excuse for inaction in the face of economic injustice.

A lot of directors tend to manipulate actors' vulnerability to get what they want, and that can work.

In the late '90s, I spent a lot of time on reservations, and there was a level of poverty and injustice that I had not witnessed before. I was shocked by it. This is federally controlled land, and there was an insidious mix of apathy and exploitation.

The world belongs to the wealthy, and nowhere is this injustice more apparent than in the workplace.

I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.

The exploitation of distressed workers and the social disparities must not continue.

'Slumdog Millionaire' has truly opened newer avenues for India.

In 'A Hijacking,' the characters are low-status people.

It feels dangerous when people say, 'Oh, Sean Baker focuses on marginalised people.' And offensive. As if I'm standing there with my planner thinking, 'OK, where's the next marginalised group I can make a movie about?'

The truth is, I feel sorry for the Old Etonians. Everybody should be judged on his or her own merits. Assuming that toffs are 'out of touch' is more modern and fashionable than assuming they have a 'natural fitness for government,' but it's no fairer.

Intersectionality is not easy. It's not as though the existing frameworks that we have - from our culture, our politics, or our law - automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in intersectionality.