Emma Watson Quotes

People feel really uncomfortable talking about race and identity, largely because the subject is so taboo.

We tend to dismiss things we don't particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations.

An Englishman fears contempt more than death.

I feel like gender lines are changing. A couple of years ago, it wasn't nearly as OK for guys to like girly-sounding music. But all of a sudden a lot of my guys friends who would like have been really disdainful of female singers are way more accepting.

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.

I think young people are recognizing the power of institutions, and we have to really dismantle a lot of the stigma and shame, culturally, but we also have to change things in terms of how government and institutions deal with this.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.

Back in the day, a pair of tight jeans was enough to earn a girl a bad reputation. Now slutty has gone Main Street.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

It may be hard to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980's and because of both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan - in particular Mrs Reagan - we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it. Something that I really appreciate was her very effective but low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience, and people began to say "hey we have to do something about this too.

I'm making fun of midwestern homophobia [in the joke], but I'm still saying faggot. And almost every month as I'm doing that joke it gets five percent less of a laugh.

One easily bears moral reproof, but never mockery.

Nowadays, you suffer the same risks - ostracism, career loss, possible assault - for being perceived as racist that you would have encountered a century ago for daring to question racist ideology.

Being offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house.

If someone feels negative about the way society or culture seems to be going, what it probably suggests is that it's just moving away from the state that they are comfortable with or used to. It's understandable why someone would feel that way.

It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.

Baby boomers helped me a great deal in my career. They launched me. They were there for me to sing my song to. And I'm not saying I'm better than anyone, but I think they turned that anti-authority baby boom mentality into their own enemy. Now I identify very closely with their children.

Political correctness has changed everything. People forget that political correctness used to be called spastic gay talk.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they're not used to? Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.

I used to use cigarettes to indicate somebody's an outsider a lot. It gave character a seedy, disreputable, almost suicidal quality. Now cigarettes are so unused - - you can't have anybody indoors smoking. If you drew that in a restaurant, you'd have to have a panel where the manager comes over and kicks them out. Unless it's set in Europe, you can't really do that. Characters who smoke - - it dates comics, somehow.

If there are older black people in the audience that I can see I will not say the n-word. I know they grew up with a different meaning.