Counter Narrative Quotes

Rather than allowing jihadists to shut down debate, it must proliferate so much that they simply cannot kill us all.

There is a perception within our community and the world that black people don't love each other. That we don't fight for each other. That perception is so dangerous. We need positive images to counter the negative portrayals we see every day. And positive doesn't mean perfect. Perfect is boring.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

Any talk of me engaging in a conspiracy against Pakistan is completely baseless.

You cannot fight a people who are fighting for an ideology with no ideas of your own.

After Mitt Romney's defeat, the RNC released its official assessment of what happened - a failure to reach younger voters, nonwhite voters, women - but was met with a counter-narrative that, in fact, it was Romney's failure to be conservative enough that led to a depressed Republican base.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

If Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or any of these compromising Negros who say exactly what the white man wants to hear is interviewed anywhere in the country you don't get anybody to offset what they say. But whenever a black man stands up and says something that white people don't like then the first thing that man does is run around to try and find somebody to say something to offset what has just been said. This is natural but it is done.

It's always important not to fall for the narrative of the terrorists. If you want to fight for getting a normal life back, you also have to participate.

I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.

Demagoguery sells. And therefore, radio stations will put it on. But that doesn't mean that you can't do something else and also make it sell.

The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history.

There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

Don't hate the media, become the media.

We're going in the wrong direction and I think the only way to counter that is to bring the story home in really concrete ways to people - in ways that kids can understand and non-scientists can understand.

We're gonna need more than winning elections; we're gonna need to change the way people think, and they're not gonna change what they think if there's no counter to the way liberalism is presented in the pop culture.

When Dylann Roof walked into a black church, he wanted to start a race war. We didn't let him do that because we didn't cast him as a representative of the white race. We didn't give into his narrative. We did the exact opposite. And I think that we have to be careful not to give into the apocalyptic narrative of ISIS that wants to start a war between Muslims and everybody else.

We want to go further than preventing people from becoming terrorists and focus on a broader approach to counter-extremism - both violent and non-violent.

I would say we must win the information war against ISIS. Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it.

I avoid continuously writing or tweeting about ISIS, as it centres them in the narrative and we end up reacting to them and reacting to the agenda they set.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

I'm a real believer in counter-speech when it comes to crazy stuff we don't like.

Journalists are often portrayed as cynical. I often think it's the opposite.

One thing that God revealed to me is that we as Christians are going to have to get a portion of the media so that we can present the good news on a major basis the way that they're presenting the bad news on a major basis.