Clint Smith Quotes

I think history repeats itself. There's a constant conversation between the oppressed and the oppressor. No matter what your field is, whether it's gender equality, the Time's Up movement, or diversity casting, it's always going to be a back-and-forth battle.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.

Poverty is rooted in injustice.

If you're perpetuating discrimination, you're perpetuating inequality.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

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.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

The world is an enormous injustice.

Bolivia is not yet a country of equals.

I think the world of 'District 9' has a lot of race and oppression-based ideas that I would still like to explore in that world.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Our nation's long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history.

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.