Howard Thurman Quotes

My films are motivated by a keen interest in highlighting issues that affect marginalized populations who are caught in difficult circumstances.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

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 that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Whoever is content with the world, and who profits from its lack of justice, does not want to change it.

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

I have spent all my life advocating on behalf of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. As a social justice and human rights activist, and now as President of the Republic of Malawi, I have a deep appreciation for the challenges of those on the margins of society.

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

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! – and listens to their testimony.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

The evil inequities and oppression of every kind which afflict millions of men and women today openly contradict Christ's Gospel and cannot leave the conscience of any Christian indifferent.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people's flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities.

The poor man looks upon the law as an enemy, not as a friend. For him, the law is always taking something away.

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

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

The fantastic thing about 'Jasper Jones' is that although it's set in 1969, the themes are still so topical. We're still struggling with racism and sexism and domestic violence and abuse.

We deserve to live in a world where there's no impunity, but beyond this question of impunity, there are all these structures that are actually doing a disservice to our people.

I didn't need a harassment scandal to break out in Hollywood or misogynistic people in government to know they exist. Anybody who's a woman, a minority, or a thinking, perceiving male can see that it exists.