Dennis Haysbert Quotes

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

Ireland is a place where conditions are never normal—where class is distorted by race and an alien aristocracy.

This form is only an application for a marriage license and yet it asks for my color. I looked at my arm and wrote “pink”, Your assistant then said that I have to pick from White, Brown, Black, Yellow or Red. The form says I answer under penalty of perjury, so I want to tell the truth, but the city of New York must explain to me how I tell what color I am. I am a trained artist and I can assure you that my skin color is not a white. My ancestors came from Germany and the yellow Mongols and Huns raped and pillaged there, not to mention the blacks from North Africa. So what is the test a citizen should use to determine color if not pigment?

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.

I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

Does a black person make them an African American? No. There are Hispanics that are very, very dark skinned so the word has lost its meaning, it's not a very concise or proper word to use even today and it wasn't then.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.

It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.

As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance.

I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don't have to think for yourself, or you're a master, and you don't have to work for yourself.

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, 'We're black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we're all brought up differently.'

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.

... a male person, including an Indian and excluding a person of Mongolian or Chinese race.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

Our party is divided into those who sit and those who are sat upon.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.