Patti Smith Quotes

The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.

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

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

Society is better off without certain people.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.

Why do you all push us around?

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

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

Just because we don't recognise someone from an area of our own lives, somehow it has become easy to simply ignore them and walk away.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

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

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

If you are on the wrong side of society you can’t win.

We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and not being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognize us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff.

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.

I saw a martyr in the Wolf Man, who is the very moving essence of outsiderness, with which I identified fully.