What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness i...s the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really impor...tant to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder--in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religi...on, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we eliminated the dog from our lives, nothing much would happen to our ecology. Independent of man, the dog is a vandal. With m...an, he does a little sheep-herding, a little watch-dogging. He helps law enforcement officers control the troublesome ghetto-dwellers and protest marchers. He sniffs out "hash" and "grass." He goes out on weekends and helps man murder other forms of life for pleasure. But mostly he is just an adjunct to man's ego.... The cat owes man nothing. Some experts estimate that there is one homeless cat managing on its own for every one with a home, which makes a total cat population in the U.S. of more than fifty million. That means the largest nonhuman animal population in the nation, short of rodents, whose number is beyond estimate. Eliminate cats from our ecology and, in a matter of weeks, we would be overrun by rodents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped... people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Again and again, I struggled though the storm. Once I fainted--and it wasn't in the script. I was hauled to the studio on a sled, ...thawed out with hot tea, and then brought back to the blizzard, where the others were waiting. We filmed all day and all night, stopping only to eat standing near a bonfire. We never went inside.... The blizzard never slackened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have got to stop the nervous Nellies and the Toms from going to the Man's place. I don't believe in killing, but a good whippin...g behind the bushes wouldn't hurt them.... These bourgeoisie Negroes aren't helping. It's the ghetto Negroes who are leading the way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the incre...asingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »