Dick Durbin Quotes

Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I'm in.

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.

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.

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

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

If you're trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn't the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.

The thematic core of 'X-Men' is tolerance. It's that for those of us who are different in any way - in a big way, whether it's you're a minority, you're a woman, you're a Muslim, you are suppressed or marginalized - it can go the whole spectrum - but even if you are shy or you feel like an outsider - and X-Men are outsiders.

I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.

A week before shooting, they told me, You don't have the part, yet. We're still trying to find a handicapped kid who can act. Either that or we break your legs.

When you're in the minority, it doesn't matter what you're agenda is, you're not going to have the degree of freedom that you have as a member of the majority.

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

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

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

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

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.

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'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

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

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

It's always the minorities who aren't a part of the mainstream who define what the limits... of the majority are going to be.

When you're fighting for economic and social justice, you're always fighting for the minority.

As soon as you say that there is a community called, let's say, black Americans, you've immediately created a boundary line - who's in that group, who's outside that group.

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

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