Danny Glover Quotations

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play

But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country

Im a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

I've always been able to make choices that don't embarrass me.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.

But rarely have I made choices that made me feel I was really compromising what I believe.

I've been a Goodwill Ambassador for the UNICEF and the UNICEF family for more than twelve years

One of the main purveyors of violence in this world has been this country.

It's also important for those who promote those issues within the white community - the somewhat privileged community - to talk about issues affecting people of color

The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist

New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs that have pay, that - living wages?

I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

I'm not so vain as to believe that my involvement changes anything whatsoever.

Well I don't know because I don't have a real relationship with the industry.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

This country has always been run by elite, and it's an elitist democracy. And that's not a radical concept. It's elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don't talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day.

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

When you've moved past a point where you're just scrambling for jobs, you think about the things that you want to do. And the things that you want to do are governed by what you've seen, what you choose to embrace

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

Yes, Bush is racist. We all knew that, but the world is only finding it out now.

She alone has stood up for issues that are important to this country and important to the world. We're not here to judge the merits of the case; we're here to support our sister.

I was seven years old when the U.S. Supreme Court made the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. From that point on, I followed the movement.

Bush promoted a conservative program, designed to eliminate everything Americans had accomplished so far in matters of race and equality.

Playing opposite her was just a dance in sharing -- a beautiful dance in sharing, ... We were like singing a song to each other.

My best hope is to bring a tone through my engagement, drawing attention to organizations that are often left out of the mainstream media.

You know, we do not want the militarization of Haiti. We do not see a Haitian as a protectorate where it relinquishes its own sovereignty.

The points leader (Ferris) had nothing for me. Once I got outside, I was gone.

What you've done is effectively cut off any discourse or dialogue. If we're only going to govern by anger, then we've lost the game.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a jail or it's bin Laden.

Kids made fun of me because I was dark skinned, had a wide nose, and was dyslexic. Even as an actor, it took me a long time to realize why words and letters got jumbled in my mind and came out differently.

Those titles, Executive Producer or actor, are unimportant. I always try to approach my role as an artist. The first thing you want to do, that you attempt to do as an artist, is to have some sort of input into the material that you are working on. That is how my process begins; I say to myself: "I want to do this kind of work or I want to do that kind of work."

Yes, (Bush is a) racist. We all knew that but the world is only finding it out now. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died from (the) death penalty were Afro-Americans or Hispanics. (Bush) promoted a Conservative program, designed to eliminate everything Americans had accomplished so far in matters of race and equality.

Just look at the cinema itself: It's comprised of lots of movies about graphic novels, and if you're not 20 years old and wearing a cape and a mask and white, you're out of business. Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.

I have the capacity to express what I feel needs to be expressed. And I try to do what I believe in.

We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.

The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that's what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

It is the most painful thing to see how young children become collateral damage of wars, but when peace treaties are signed landmines do not respect any of these accords. And as long as these silent killers linger after wars, children will never know peace

One of the main purveyors of violence in this world has been this country America.

Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects

Democracy is about criticism. I didn't elect Obama because he's a black; I voted for Obama because he was the right person at the time. Period. The exceptionalism of a black U.S. President is not important to me. It's what he does. And who he has at the table. And what he does to change the world - that's what's important.

Hollywood is designed to check the box office on Monday morning and see: "How'd we do? How much?" It's another facet of this whole culture of accumulation and consumption. Black people are caught up in it, white people are caught up in it, white actors, black actors, female actresses - everybody's caught up in it.

Mel Gibson is my friend. I love Mel. He's not the person that I hear people are often trying to diminish. Whatever his challenges are in life, he still remains someone I'm very close to.

Whole ideology of consumption almost to the point of religion. Whether it's the consumption of entertainment or the consumption around buying things, we're so caught up in the idea around our appetites that we don't have a clear distinction about what we need and what we just want. Plus, the decline of trade unions is a factor. When you have powerful unions, you have a working class that is politicized.

Did you know a child is orphaned by AIDS every 15 seconds. Millions of children are going it alone. Missing their childhood. Missing their mother. Missing their father. AIDS is devastating families around the globe. Children are missing your support. Unite for children. Unite against AIDS.

Mother Earth is in pain and ailing - bglobal warming. The world is dealing with issues of immigration, deindustrialization, and poverty. When I was born, there were 2.5 billion people living on the whole planet. Now there are 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day. That's the kind of reality we have to deal with.

President Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement. He had the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in this country - schools that train you how to run the political paradigm, not challenge it. The leaders of the Black Power Movement were challenging that paradigm.

I want people with epilepsy to know that there are ways in which they can play a role in their own recovery. It's all in how they approach what is happening and how they can use that as a catalyst for their own growth. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that people are willing to embrace you if you share your story.

It's important for people of color to link up with issues around globalization, food security, health, the environment.

... leadership has to be focused on some very radical ideas that only we as 21st Century people can talk about: making sure people have a livelihood, making sure people receive a living wage, making sure the environment, the Mother Earth, is embraced and cherished and not destroyed. Making sure people are healthy in what they eat, making sure we hold people and corporations accountable for the damage they do not only to our environment but to our institutions.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in Northern cities like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the Black Power Movement. It was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuum of this whole process of democratization.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

I never thought about being an actor.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is...

The breaking point was to stand outside on 116th Street and have five cabs pass me up.

Band isn't something you do as a hobby, but merely a way of life. What you do in the band dictates the kind of person you are, or what type of person you will become.

They were enormous for me, you can't imagine how enormous, ... Those are the people that kind of pulled me through.

It's one of the classic works of this period. The novel itself stands up on its own, and as a result of that, you're going to have a great deal of material as an offspring.

I had a chance to meet members of the Count Basie Jazz Band when they came to Southwest to give a jazz clinic.

I hope people become engaged in the dialogue and embrace these issues in such a way that it doesn't generate hostility and fear.

It has both social, political and historical dynamics to it. That story is not singularly an African American story, it has universality to it.

I read Fanon when I was 20, and his writings moved me. It's very important for me to be involved in consciousness-raising.

I read Fanon when I was 20, and his writings moved me, ... It's very important for me to be involved in consciousness-raising.

If I judge a character, I'm defeating the purpose.