“You can’t criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently.”

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

The only weapons that make me dangerous are my mind, mouth and pride, which will surely educate you.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

The campaign against the death penalty has been – while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

History always seems to repeat itself.

Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.

Discrimination based on skin color, sexual orientation,& gender needs to stop. We’re all humans at the end of the day.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

Flattery and criticism are always in our profession.

There’s people that appreciate what I do; there’s people that criticize it.

Build the courage to take the criticism when things go wrong.

It’s easy to become very self-critical when you’re an actor. Then you get critiqued by the critics. Whether you agree with them or not, people are passing judgment on you.

I had three rules for my players: No profanity. Don’t criticize a teammate. Never be late.

Young people need models, not critics.

I never read reviews. I’m not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators.

Criticism is just a part of life, a prevalent part of life, and somehow, people don’t take it very well.