Ada Yonath Quotes

Prison killed me. It destroyed me.

'Firelight' is a beautiful story about a lot of young women. My character, Caroline, is a girl who has a bad boyfriend, and he ends up getting her locked up and incarcerated.

I came out even with all the struggles I endured on Rikers Island.

I did almost a year in prison, a year in prison, just because my name is Foxy Brown.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery other than in prisons - but it was a lie that you regained your freedom once you left the prison gates.

The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.

The grievances of which we complain, be assured, sir, are not imaginary, but real—not local, but universal—not occasional, but continual, everyday matter-of-fact things and have become, to the disgrace of our common country, matters of history.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

I think there are more anarchists bred in those places (lower criminal courts of New York City) than are made in the meetings of the anarchistic clubs. I think that many a man who in his heart is innocent and who is brought up by the police unfairly before a court which handles him unfairly, whatever may be the reason, goes out with a feeling of hatred toward the institutions which we desire to sustain.

There is not a single man in prison today who does not claim to be an ardent patriot

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

We are saying that when our nation targets law enforcement efforts at someone's appearance or what neighborhood they live in or what job they do, it is not living up to our nation's basic ideals.

I'm a woman and a person of color; I know what it's like out there in the workplace.

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

Poussey is a really huge part of 'Orange,' and I'm sure her name will always echo through the halls of Litchfield, dead or alive.

I saw the discrimination that was happening towards Middle Easterners, Muslims and other brown people who had nothing to do with 9/11. It suddenly felt like a duty of mine to talk about some of the crazy things that were going on and make fun of how stupid it was.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that's one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that's not the case.

In the late '90s, I spent a lot of time on reservations, and there was a level of poverty and injustice that I had not witnessed before. I was shocked by it. This is federally controlled land, and there was an insidious mix of apathy and exploitation.

When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.

You have to understand when you're organizing with women of color, you can't use words like 'marginalized' and 'second-class citizen' loosely.