Jessica Hagedorn Quotes

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.

I don't like laughing at people unless they're in a privileged position or if they're in authority. If it's poor people or people who live on the outskirts or on the margins, or the underdog, I'd rather be laughing with them.

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'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

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.

White collar conservative flashin down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me, they all assume my kind will drop and die, but I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.

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

I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society. I'm always on their side. I find them more human, maybe. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence.

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

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

I value what I learned from being cast in the margins and what that felt like.

I feel that discrimination and hierarchy is something that people have to face constantly.

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

I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

If I feel any marginalisation, it's because the things that concern me aren't so important to other people.

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.

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

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.

If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.

When you exist in the centre of a debate, as a topic, a hypothesis - otherised and stigmatised - you become the prop in a proposition.

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.