JaVale McGee Quotes

Look, I'm not a water expert. I'm not a scientist. But I've been to Flint. I've seen what's happening. We have a third-world situation still going on in the United States of America. That's the truth.

This is America, but the way that the people of Flint are being treated with this water crisis is like a third-world country.

I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.

After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in one of the nine counties effected in West Virginia …what it’s like to not have any water except to flush commodes and put out fires….It has devastated this area … everything is closing … no restaurant is allowed to open…, the people are in their homes, the schools are closed. You’re not supposed to take showers and certainly not supposed to drink the tap water…. I smelled it and tasted it, and I knew something was very wrong.

Flint is to the lead issue what Three Mile Island was to nuclear power. People are stepping back and thinking, 'There still is lead in my home?'

Flint is a big, industrial city. But when I was growing up, they had the recession, lead in the water, and all this other stuff. The city was really depleted.

'Mercury' is about a big company exploiting a small town. There is a place in Tamil Nadu called Kodaikanal. It had a thermometer factory, which would dump the mercury into the river. This affected a lot of people. This incident is the inspiration for this film.

Can we get out of this system something good for us? We could, if we were united with an intelligent self-interest that we could push, we might be able to get something. But, America is out to destroy the little man - I'm talking about those in the highest places. Flint, Michigan [contaminated water supply] was not an accident, that's by design.

What happened in Flint is immoral. The children of Flint are just as precious as the children of any other part of America.

The cost of war impacts all of us - both in the human cost and the cost that's being felt frankly in places like Flint, Michigan, where families and children are devastated and destroyed by completely failed infrastructure because of lack of investment.

To you, the people of Flint, I say, as I have before, I am sorry and I will fix it. No citizen of this great state should endure this kind of catastrophe. Government failed you. Federal, state and local leaders by breaking the trust you placed in us.

Extremism can flourish only in an environment where basic governmental social responsibility for the welfare of the people is neglected. Political dictatorship and social hopelessness create the desperation that fuels religious extremism.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.

Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.

Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black community in particular.

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

I would not apply the strategy of Calderon. I would look at the causes. Violence in Mexico has its origins in the lack of development and corruption.

While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

You know, many people have called me, friends from the nationalist camp, revisionists and so on, from around the world, have called me over the years - and now again because of what happened - and they are all very cynical about the police and the authorities.