Barbara Amiel Quotes

You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

If there are no superior people to look after a population, the common people have no security.

I resent anyone coming in and claiming to be a minority as I am.

White men have too many chiefs.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

All those good people huddling behind bars in gated communities - it's the wrong way round. The others should have the bars.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.

Being an openly gay black man, unfortunately I've had experiences working with individuals who've tried to exploit my blackness or my gayness in a way that doesn't make me feel comfortable, or they try to manipulate me into being a caricature of myself.

Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.

If you're mocking anyone, make sure it's those at the top of the food chain, not the bottom.

Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice.

What is it going to take to dismantle the systems that keep me from being able to live well and that keep me and so many other people from being able to access the things that we need and deserve?

Throughout college and law school, as well as in my career as a lawyer and police reform advocate, I've faced various toxic combinations of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

I don't like to see people using their power over others, trying to hurt people who are weak or poor or people with darker skin or anyone who doesn't have as much privilege. It makes me so angry. I want to fight for people. I want to be able to make some kind of difference in the world.

Inequality is an enormously complicated thing that is both good and bad.

If too many people feel excluded from the system and cannot access its benefits, they will ultimately rebel against it.

There's nothing that's more unfair or unjust than people using their power to try to make other people feel small, to tell them who they are or what they are capable of, to say their identity doesn't belong.

I am not OK with the system that allows certain people to fail or be chucked out. I don't accept that.

If we aren’t intersectional, some of us, the most vulnerable, are going to fall through the cracks.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.