Taika Waititi Quotes

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

I'm an underdog person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite society.

As straight Americans we have two choices: we can choose to sit back and enjoy our rights as we have them, or we can realize that it is actually not freedom at all when our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues do not share these basic rights.

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

We'll always be re-examining how we relate to each other in terms of race and gender, in terms of power and access.

If you're trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn't the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.

Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in anti-racism, in class politics, so, obviously, it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don't ourselves experience.

I'm not a member of a minority but I can empathize with what's going on.

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

I'm trying to appeal to the disenfranchised everybody, not just specifically gay.

Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with the 'demonized' so that the demonizing will stop; it stands with the 'disposable' so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

If we truly seek diversity in fiction, we have to let the needs of others come before our need to define ourselves as social justice allies.

We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

If you've ever felt oppressed on any level, there's something from 'The Wire' that you can take and identify with.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

This is a hard job to do …. We represent the underdog, and that makes the top dogs angry.

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

We are all Jews now.