John Ridley Quotes

If we live in a society that is stuck in victimhood, we will have lots of victims.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

It seems to be part of the human condition to need someone you can look down on. I still don't get that one.

Whenever I run into prejudice. I smile and feel sorry for them, and I say to myself, There's one more argument for birth control.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people - and to hate those other people.

There will always be those people who are just backward and ignorant. There will always be those people. They need somebody to feel superior to.

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.

People have evolved into something selfish, greedy and intolerant. People are unaccepting, because of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation... I've seen it in punk clubs, and I've seen it in the world.

I think in our society we too often choose the people we associate with based on our own hasty judgments.

... this is a grievance society and that if you want to get into its leading edge you pretty well have to be a victim.

Prejudices are the props of civilization.

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation, or a distinct group by its least worthy members.

A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

I think there's always going to be some kind of bigotry or some kind of racism. There has to be, because people can't feel that they have any hero qualities unless there's someone beneath them.

When we blame all Muslims, all Syrians, or all members of any other group because of the actions of individuals, we fall into the trap of asserting collective guilt. We empower the narrow-minded ideology that we are trying to defeat.

I always felt the 'X-Men,' in a subtle way, often touched upon the subject of racism and inequality, and I believe that subject has come up in other titles, too. But we would never pound hard on the subject, which must be handled with care and intelligence.

For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.

When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.

You know what should be banned? Stuff that's whack. The world is controversial. The world is classist. The world is racist.

I laugh all the time about our investigation, especially about making a fool of David Duke, who likes to think I don't have the intelligence of an ape because he thinks I'm genetically inferior.

I think that there's still a lot of prejudice going on. I don't really think it's only an issue of football. I think football is a mirror of society.

Categorizing people economically and hating them because you think they're this way is a prejudice.