Quotes About Stigma

Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.

In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight.

People tell me that I should eat more, but they don't know me: I eat a lot. It's pretty unpleasant that people assume every model is anorexic and bulimic.

The problems of the disabled are unpopular.

In this business, there is an insane amount of pressure, spoken and unspoken, to be thin. If you look at some of the television shows, eating disorders become like a competitive thing.

I'm afraid of being poor; I'm afraid of living in the projects... I'm afraid of being thought as unsuccessful.

Serbia has become a pariah nation, untouchable like a leper.

My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives.

There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic.

Usually, it's men who run these big monster companies, and girl companies are usually much smaller - it's like an unwritten tech-industry stigma.

I know when I was an assistant coach and I started interviewing for head coaching jobs, I actually lost out on many jobs, several jobs, and the complaint that I got was, 'Well, he doesn't fit the mold of a head coach. He doesn't look the part. He's not gonna jump up and down. He's not going to scream.'

We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious.

People have so many preconceptions about me. I always knew it was going to be an uphill battle.

The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.

I remember walking through Romford with my sister and I had my bald head and people would stare. My sister would get upset about it and ask people what they were looking at. Now, I've got to the stage that I don't even bother shaving it some days.

I don't get upset if people think I'm crazy. If you go to a mental hospital and someone calls you a name, would you get upset? Of course not. Well, that's the way I think about the world. They don't know any better.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

If I do a movie where I have to have a son and it's a chubby kid, my mother is always like, 'You were never like that.' She gets so upset about it.

When they make a woman's picture, they treat it like a 'woman's picture.' In the '40s, they didn't treat Joan Crawford movies like that, but as the big movies of their year. I'm upset that there's no 'Terminator' with a woman in Arnold Schwarzenegger's role. Because that would make just as much money.

For instance, one big issue in hip hop is the gay thing. It's 2013, and it's a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It's crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip hop is small-minded or stupid - and that's not the case.

I have always thought of myself as someone for equal rights. I don't mind being called a feminist, and I get really upset when female celebrities resist the title as if it's a bad thing, because it's a very good thing.

I remember I was playing basketball, and an entire arena was, like, chanting 'Big Foot.' It was a high school game, but... you're constantly being reminded you're bigger; you don't look like everybody. There were days where I would be upset, and, like, I'd cry about it.

Discounting the ineffably repetitive homophobic barbs that I receive most days, Twitter trolls' most common gripe against me appears to be that I am 'posh.' Contrary to their unshakeable view, I was not born into the upstairs world.

Being an actor, you always feel like you're swimming upstream. People are going, 'No, they don't like you. They don't like the way you look. They don't like how old you are.'