Quotes About Representation

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

I've heard other actors saying they don't want to play a character with an accent at all. To me, that's kind of an insult to somebody like me who did have an accent.

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

How often do we see a Muslim woman who is intelligent and independent, and has a voice of her own and is career-driven, on American TV?

I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying, We don't have work for black women.'

The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.

I don't think it's the intent of baseball not to have black ballplayers, but we have to find a way to get these kids back. We lost them to football. We lost them to basketball. We lost them to golf. People don't see how cool and exciting this game is.

If the creators of cartoons are intentionally or unintentionally giving children the idea that gay people are part of the big, happy human family, that's a good thing, not a bad one.

You don't often see a cross section of female characters interacting with each other at the top of a chain.

Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

In each and every election, it's your rights, it's your freedoms, it's your interests that are on the ballot.

I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful.

Don't have just anyone run your social media. I think it's insane when brands or celebrities relegate their social media to an intern or someone who does not know them well.

In A.I., the holy grail was how do you generate internal representations.

I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.

Except two or three parties, most parties are dependent on one family. I believe that only parties where internal democracy is alive can achieve the ideals of democracy.

Costa Rica is not afraid to go before any international body.

The international community doesn't cast a vote here. Gabonese people do, so I am accountable to them. They are the ones to give me my job or take it away. So this is what is really important to me.

There are not many musicians from India who are working internationally in pop. My aim is to change that and show the world that we have so much more to offer.

Some of the oddest foods I've encountered are 'American' foods represented internationally.

How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.

If your company is mostly men, make sure to have women on the interview team. While you don't want to 'tokenize' someone for their identity, it's important to show potential candidates that you're making an effort.

The token gay character is always so funny and so fantastic. That's happened a lot. Or they're often purely victims.