Patricia Hill Collins Quotes

I'm not allowing my perspective to be dictated by the dominant culture.

An issue between a people and a class

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.

the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

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.

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

Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.

Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

Why do you all push us around?

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

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?

There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them.

The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.

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

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women - or the welfare of anyone - depending on who controls it.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

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

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

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.

And what sort of philosophical doctrine is thi - that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others.

Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.