Quotes by Filmmakers - Page 12

They've been practicing racism so long, it's perfect.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Unfortunately, 'post racism' is also a myth, like unicorns and black people who survive to the end of a horror movie.
Justin Simien
White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.
Darnell Lamont Walker
My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors.
Darnell Lamont Walker
You can't forgive your captor and simultaneously be upset at your place in society.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If your house ain't in order, you ain't in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here.
Toni Cada Bambara
I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.
Darnell Lamont Walker
The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Dear Police:You can't protect me and be scared of me.
Darnell Lamont Walker
When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.
Darnell Lamont Walker
It is in racists' best interest to maintain white supremacy at all costs. They will defend it with their lives, but ONLY after they've defended it with ours.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Black people are either threats or entertainment.
Darnell Lamont Walker
What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway."Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes."Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Black bodies have become ornamental, haven't they?
Darnell Lamont Walker
I am a descendent of a whole bunch of Black folk who couldn't be broken.
Darnell Lamont Walker
If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.
Sherman Alexie
Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.
Sherman Alexie
They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit?""I suppose.""That one pissed me off, though. I ain't no prairie Indian. I'm from a salmon tribe, man. If they were going to insult me, they should've called me salmon n*****.""I'm surprised you can laugh about this.""It's what Indians do.""Weren't you afraid?""Yeah, I was afraid, but I'm afraid most of the time, you know? How would you feel if a white guy like you got dropped into the middle of a black neighborhood, like Compton, California, on a Saturday night?""I'd be very afraid.""And that's exactly how I feel living in Seattle. Hell, I feel that way living in the United States. Indians are outnumbered, Officer. Those three guys scared me bad, but I've been scared for a long time.
Sherman Alexie
Racism is a common delusion, a mental illness that can be cured with truthful education.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
African-Amendment.
Darnell Lamont Walker
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
Sherman Alexie
If at the end of the day the people of our city escape, it will be good.But if somehow our democracy remains standing - it will be even better.
Boaz Yakin
Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Kalle Lasn
This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.
Tariq Ali
How does paying people more money make you more money?It works like this. The more you pay your workers, the more they spend. Remember, they're not just your workers- they're your consumers, too. The more they spend their extra cash on your products, the more your profits go up. Also, when employees have enough money that they don't have to live in constant fear of bankruptcy, they're able to focus more on their work- and be more productive. With fewer personal problems and less stress hanging over them, they'll lose less time at work, meaning more profits for you. Pay them enough to afford a late model car (i.e. one that works), and they'll rarely be late for work. And knowing that they'll be able to provide a better life for their children will not only give them a more positive attitude, it'll give them hope- and an incentive to do well for the company because the better the company does, the better they'll do.Of course, if you're like most corporations these days- announcing mass layoffs right after posting record profits- then you're already hemorrhaging the trust and confidence of your remaining workforce, and your employees are doing their jobs in a state of fear. Productivity will drop. That will hurt sales. You will suffer. Ask the people at Firestone: Ford has alleged that the tire company fired its longtime union employees, then brought in untrained scab workers who ended up making thousands of defective tires- and 203 dead customers later, Firestone is in the toilet.
Michael Moore
I realized that this was the big secret of democracy -- that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something.
Michael Moore
I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.
Norman Mailer
There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.
Michael Reeves
Coyote, who is the creator of all of us, was sitting on his cloud the day after he created Indians. Now, he liked the Indians, liked what they were doing. This is good, he kept saying to himself. But he was bored. He thought and thought about what he should make next in the world. But he couldn't think of anything so he decided to clip his toenails. ... He looked around and around his cloud for somewhere to throw away his clippings. But he couldn't find anywhere and he got mad. He started jumping up and down because he was so mad. Then he accidentally dropped his toenail clippings over the side of the cloud and they fell to the earth. They clippings burrowed into teh ground like seeds and grew up to be white man. Coyote, he looked down at his newest creation and said, "Oh, shit.
Sherman Alexie
My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep.
Darnell Lamont Walker
I didn’t mean to snore in your ear, but I wanted to inhale all of what was wrapped up in the comforter with me.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Never assume you are alone, because you never truly are. Only when your life has surely ended and your loved ones have forgotten you is when you are gone. Gone from this world and the next.Sleep is when you are most vulnerable. It’s a sanctuary and a curse; how you perceive it is up to you.
Mandi Lynn
By morning I was worn out. My limbs felt heavy as wood, my head cottony. I might've felt better if I hadn't slept at all.
Ransom Riggs
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.
Jean Cocteau
Life is often a Labyrinth of Passions without exit.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.
Ruth Ozeki
If they knew how much you kept inside to keep from hurting them, but hurting yourself instead, maybe they’d love you more.
Darnell Lamont Walker
It was once necessary to go from somebody to nothing to become everything.
Darnell Lamont Walker
But you have to sacrifice yourself for YOURSELF, too.
Darnell Lamont Walker
When my father was 17, he went to Montreal and found these submarine sandwich shops that were really successful, and weren't in Toronto [his home town]. So he went to my grandparents and said: "Look, you have to give me the seed money to open up one of these places. We'll make a fortune. They've got lines going round the block. There's nothing like that here." And my grandfather's response was: "Look, I'm sure these sandwiches are really good, and if we scraped the money together we could make a lot of money and your mother and I would be really proud of you, but you need to find something that has *magic* in it for you." It was off of that conversation that my father went to college on a music scholarship, started a film club and became one of the most successful directors of all time.
Jason Reitman
You hold in your hands my heart, my soul, and my very being. You are already the Queen of my heart, my love, my true love, my only love.”- Kian, Frost Kisses
Kailin Gow
Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story:“I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I finally made it to the falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up. ‘What the hell are you doing here? He asked me. I said, ‘waiting for a vision.’ Then your father said, ‘All you’re going to get here is mugged.’ So he drove me to Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision. ‘Take care of each other’ is what my dreams were saying. ‘Take care of each other.
Sherman Alexie
I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it’s totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That’s been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.
Michael Haneke
People are entitled to different opinions and views. Just because somebody doesn't agree with you doesn't mean they're wrong. Within the context of their reality they feel just as right, as you do within the context of your reality. Appreciate and respect that and perhaps in time you'll find even ground.
Deon Potgieter
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your perception...you see what is, where most people see what they expect.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Kiss me with your eyes.
Andy Warhol
Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight.
Andy Warhol
Once upon a time the world was a realm of unanswered questions and there was room in it for poetry. Man stood beneath the sky and he asked “why?”. And his question was beautiful.The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.Perhaps that is the way it has to be.
James Cameron
This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.
Guy Debord
He closed the laptop. A sure sign I was about to receive his full attention.
Ransom Riggs
As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.
Ruth Ozeki
Fear is elemental to every human endeavour involving risk and change, which includes ALL creative endeavours. To be creative is to be anxious. To endure the anxiousness - to face it and work with it, to allow it to lay bare what has been hidden - is the beginning of faith, which, in a certain sense, is the courage to become, to become present, along with all the other characters, tribes and audiences whose actions move the unfolding drama that is the world.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.
Michael Crichton
I would close my eyes and dream of something strong, dream of horses exploding, rising into the air, their hearts beating survive, survive, survive.
Sherman Alexie
No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me.
Clint Van Winkle
She drank in all their compliments and soon she was full of herself.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Being efficient is the easy part. Suppressing one's ego completely for hours at a time is really hard.
Colin Clark
Coach said. "the quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor".
Sherman Alexie
Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.
Ruth Ozeki
It is such a mistake to assume that practicing dharma will help us calm down and lead an untroubled life; nothing could be further from the truth. Dharma is not a therapy. Quite the opposite, in fact; dharma is tailored specifically to turn your life upside down—it’s what you sign up for. So when your life goes pear-shaped, why do you complain? If you practice and your life fails to capsize, it is a sign that what you are doing is not working. This is what distinguishes the dharma from New Age methods involving auras, relationships, communication, well-being, the Inner Child, being one with the universe, and tree hugging. From the point of view of dharma, such interests are the toys of samsaric beings—toys that quickly bore us senseless.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse