Jennifer Beals Quotes

I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the civil rights movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.

I find hope in knowing that I belong to a state that has a lot of people who are champions of change and progress; that we will rise up and fight for justice and equality; that, ultimately, love will trump hate.

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.

We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.

We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

We must regain our vision and hope and move our country forward on an agenda of peace and justice.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example - a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery.

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can.

Don't let anyone tell you that great things can't happen in America... Barriers can come down. Justice and equality can win.

Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our children. What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it.

Today at least I live in a better place

Push on, friend. You're just one exciting step from the banquet hall of life.

It's coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range And the machinery for change And it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken And it's here the lonely say That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. O mighty Ship of State! To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed Through the Squalls of Hate Sail on, sail on.

I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.

Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

I just have a different impression of the human race. I think we're really resilient. I think there are a lot of cynical people out there right now, and probably for good reason. But I think that ever cynic is really a damaged romantic, and they really, really, really want things to be good. And if that's the case, I don't need to tell a story that says, "Humanity, look what you've done. Now you can't go out. There's no sun. Look how you've wrecked the world." That's not me. That's not my job.

Out of defeat can come the best in human nature. As Christians face storms of adversity, they may rise with more beauty. They are like trees that grow on mountain ridges -- battered by winds, yet trees in which we find the strongest wood.

No man or woman alive, magical or not, has ever escaped some form of injury, whether physical, mental, or emotional. To hurt is as human as to breathe.

You're right, we both have been working on these films [Kung Fu Panda] forever and we know these characters so well that literally we will react to the same note in the same way. We will have the same answer most of the time.

And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.