Mahershala Ali Quotes

There needs to be more film directors of colour. They bandy about the word 'diversity' a lot, but when I say 'of colour,' I mean Asian, black - I mean people of all colour. We need to have those voices given the opportunity, not told that their films will not be distributed or will not sell well abroad.

In 1969, when I graduated from Harvard Law School, women and minorities made up a tiny fraction of the first year associates accepted by top law firms.

When I was a kid, it wasn't very often that I could go to the movies and see an entire movie carried on the shoulders of someone who looked like me.

It's not good enough to say we value diversity and then underrepresent women and minorities.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

When I joined Google, it was 1,000 people. It took me two and a half years to look around and realize there weren't a lot of people like me.

The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a yearless than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.

I think that women are underrepresented behind the camera as directors.

The reality is that there are so few roles out there for women and for women of color, and I'm a character actor, this I know. And I'm getting to see more of the roles that are out there, but there aren't many. And zilch have been studio movies. Zilch.

Two people will never be President in my lifetime. A woman and a black.

You always make a film with the hope that all types of people will want to see your work and that it doesn't matter about your color, but unfortunately it still does.

We've heard the excuses from those responsible for hiring that they don't want to take a chance on a new director. But the truth is that the industry hires new directors all the time; it's just that most of them are white males.

There are still so few female directors. There are far fewer writers than we'd like to see.

I go to castings and see several black and Asian girls, then I get to the show and look around there's just me and maybe one other coloured face.

As somebody who has been an executive producer on a television series, I can tell you that increasing director diversity is as simple as hiring more women and more people of color.

In the early IBM team, that was a racially diverse team, a gender-diverse team.

I am working for the time when unqualified Blacks, Browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.

I stand before you today to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for qualified candidates simply because he is not white or because she is not a male.

The studios gotta start making more stuff where black folks get quality stuff. But I can't trip about that because I've been making movies for 35 years, and I've played everything from an old lady to a donkey, so I can't be on here talking about, 'They don't give us enough roles' and diversity.

I think women benefit from being in places and having positions where the quality of work is the criteria, not what you look like. Not every place is like that.

I know some black actresses who have to wait every 19 films for a role. I can be cast in practically every one as a young white male.

If you look at your companies, and half of your staff are not female, and a decent percentage of them are not people of color, then you are part of the problem because you need people working for you and you need people in positions of leadership who can exercise their bias and who can exercise their perspective.

In television and the movie business, the people who are promoted and the people who are mentored always look like the white guys.

Why is it when a woman makes a film or a movie stars a female cast it is labeled women-centric because it is not white, male and middle-class men?

I think as soon as you're a woman, or any minority doing something, you automatically become a representative for it, and I think a lot of brilliant women's interviews are being wasted on talking about what it's like being a woman.