W. Kamau Bell Quotes

You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.

If there's a theme in my work, it's that I like to focus on smart people who are facing oppression and who are fighting back against it.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.

Neutrality is for referees in a football game. You have to take a stand. The really, really good journalists always take a stand with those who have no power, with those who have no rights, and with those who have no voice.

I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about, and that's really it. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change, but I am far lazier than that.

The people that are the invisible ones, the marginalized, the quote-unquote weirdos, the people that get things thrown at them, the people that get harassed every day just for existing . . . I just still strongly align with them.

We want to make sure people know deeply about the trans community and deeply about Black Lives Matter so that people can act in solidarity.

We need to realize that we should be on the side of any human being who is oppressed.

If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

I have searched all night and day for new and better words that could express my feelings and fear for the people of this country. I found no new words. I only have no hope-filled insight to deliver. I only have this warning to all Americans: Whatever this country is willing to do to the least of us, it will one day do to us all.

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right.

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.

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace.

I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.

If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.

I want to be prophetic and take stands and stand with those on the margins, and I want to laugh as much as I can.

You can't comfort the afflicted with afflicting the comfortable.

Facing sexism and racism and classism and transphobia, there are ways to choose to act in those situations, and there shouldn't be a prescriptive list of things that you have to say.

To be a revolutionary you have to be a human being. You have to care about people who have no power.

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.

Probably I understand very much the people who rise against injustice.

Never elated when someone's oppressed, never dejected when another one's blessed.