Nick Cassavetes Quotes

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

I feel that racial profiling may be a very complicated and long-standing problem. It will take a long time even to make tiny progress.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

We don't need to go back in time and make America great again, because really, America was only great for certain people.

We must acknowledge that issues like systemic racism, economic inequality, and the achievement gap are the result of manmade policies.

I'm a long-term optimist, and I don't think the problems with our society are from being overly optimistic.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.

When I was working my way up, it seemed to me that only Westerns and 'Star Treks' or sci-fi movies could afford to get away with presenting the problems - like prejudice and desegregation, for instance - that we face in our everyday lives.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

When you make movies, you have to be preoccupied with the social problems, otherwise there is no point in making a movie. To have a story, you need a social problem. Not necessarily a problem, but something to get the idea for a story, otherwise there's no story.

I always felt that rap didn't cause crime; it just reflected it.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

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

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

I’d rather be a lamppost in Harlem than the mayor of any town in Georgia.