Quotes About Equality

Give a lift to a tomato, you expect her to be nice, don't ya? After all, what kind of dames thumb rides, Sunday school teachers?

I think 'Holler If Ya Hear Me' is almost 'A Raisin in the Sun' 50 years later, with just a different 20-year-old voice speaking the words. But it's about access to the American dream and equal lives having equal value in America. It's still holding a mirror up to us so we can see ourselves.

How do we make sure that rising tides lift all boats and not just the yachts?

I admire woman like Marissa Mayer, the first female engineer and then CEO of Yahoo. Women who don't only strive to be the equals of men, but who strive to live up to their full potential.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who invested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.

After Yale Law School, I was proud to try to live up to my parents' example and began my career working for The Urban Justice Center in the streets of Newark, organizing residents to fight for better housing conditions.

I learned at Yale, one of the biggest lessons was to learn how special I am and therefore how totally unspecial I am. I was special among everyone else who was special. The fact that we're all so individual and that's what makes us special.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.

It was a given at UCSB that if there was a role that called for a person of color, it was going to be handed to me. There were certain times when maybe I didn't try as hard. Going to Yale was a way more diverse experience.

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.

I reject the idea that the guy who comes out of Yale and goes to work in the projects in Newark is good, and the guy who goes to work for a white-shoe law firm is bad. We're all mountain rangers. We all have peaks and valleys.

Neither my MFA from Yale School of Drama nor my BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University make me any different from other actors in film, television, or theatre.

I got colored mechanics in the United States Navy Yard for the first time.

I grew up playing with boys in the yard and my brother in the backyard and boys in the schoolyard.

Being a Diva in a man's world, you're constantly in an uphill battle; pitching ideas, trying to get TV time, trying to get in-ring time, the whole nine yards.

There are virtually no females who would be able to lug a fallen male solider weighing 200 pounds naked, before donning battle equipment, 200 yards out of the line of fire.

Imagine if a mob of Black people wanted to go in the White House. Imagine what'd happen. It'd be tear gas. It'd be rubber bullets. It'd be the whole nine yards.

I don't even call them fans. I don't like that. They're literally just a part of my life; they're a part of my family. I don't think of them as on a lower level than me. I don't think I'm anything but equal to all of them. So yeah, they're basically all of my siblings.

I get asked a lot about being a woman within the industry and how difficult it is, and yeah, it is - but it's difficult for everybody... I'm not a 'burn-your-bra' feminist.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't really speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

I think what you have to recognise is everybody has their own deal, and everybody has challenges. Do I think that it was easier for me because at a certain point in my career I didn't have children? Yeah, I think absolutely so. But everybody has their own deal.

The day-to-day microaggressions that we all face, yeah, you have to let some stuff slide, or you go, 'I gotta keep moving; there's bigger fish to fry.' It's something that I still deal with. But I've tried to have the audacity of equality and to follow my heart in those moments where I feel like something is wrong.