Quotes About Representation

My paintings don't simply represent what I see; they present viewers with what I want them to see.

If you're putting your name on something, it's really important to be a part of it, or else people will just do whatever they want with it. And then it's not really you, and it won't be true.

There's people who don't want to see bodies like mine or bodies like their own bodies.

I think it is time for all babies to let us know who they want for president.

The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth.

I love the fact that they [girls ]are into Superman and Green Lantern and Batman and everything, and they really do have all those toys as well, but I don't want all their role models to be men.

One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.

You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.

I have to speak for myself. As far as videos go - casting, the artwork, everything - I'm completely hands-on. You have to be if you want your points across.

We're not policy people and we don't want to be policy people. All we're interested in, as social scientists, is data that accurately represents reality.

There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

Dunyazad was right about Princess Budur- and all the rest of those story women who dress up as men and do man things perfectly well. One thing those tales are saying underneath is that women aren't inferior. They're equal to men.

Because the media always serve up heroes and villians, there had to be the terrible mothers, the anti-Madonnas, the hideous counterexamples good mothers were meant to revile. We regret to report that nearly all of these women were African American and were disproportionately featured as failed mothers in news stories about "crack babies," single, teen mothers, and welfare mothers.

What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better way to keep people longing for childhood than to paint a picture of adulthood no right-minded soul could ever want?

Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.

If you invite representative voices, shouldn't you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it's called whitesplaining. There isn't a word for it in German.

Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that's something to keep in mind.

Don't we know any. . .er. . .cheap lawyers?

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...

Patrick Henry argued that according to British law, no British citizen could be forced to pay a tax unless his representative... in Parliament agreed. But since there were no Americans in Parliament, the colonies didn't have representation. Any tax passed by Parliament was illegal...

As the first Hispanic female governor in history, little girls often come up to me in the grocery store or the mall. They look and point, and when they get the courage, they ask 'Are you Susana?' and they run up and give me a hug.

When I was growing up, Lieutenant Uhura was a major role model for me, a strong black woman on the bridge of a starship… -In a miniskirt, answering the interplanetary telephone?

We're going to form a republic where the people of each district and the Capitol can elect their own representatives to be their voice in a centralized government. Don't look so suspicious; it's worked before.