You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.
Education in British schools isn't good enough. It's not remotely imaginative enough. It lets down too many children, excluding them from society, and, as I've often said, people who are excluded from society tend to express themselves in ways not acceptable to society.
Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
If too many people feel excluded from the system and cannot access its benefits, they will ultimately rebel against it.
Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
Some of the cases which have come to light of employers being disciplined or sacked for simply trying to talk about their faith in the workplace I find quite extraordinary. The sanitisation will lead to people of faith excluding themselves from the public space and being excluded.
We are very, very thoughtful about once an economic system creates maldistribution of wealth, thinking about how we redistribute it, but we need to pay attention to why that system is excluding people to create that maldistribution in the first place.
Most of the people that I learned and experienced jazz with have been with foreign white people, mostly from France. Excluding my family.
Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'
The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.
People like me were supposed to be into exclusivity, unapproachable. That's what I hate most. I think it's very demode.
Social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them.
There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.
I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.
The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
We could talk, act, and dress funny. We were excused for socially inappropriate behavior: 'Oh, he's a programmer'. It was all because we knew this technology stuff that other people found completely mystifying.
People look at me as an exotic person, which is great, because whatever Hollywood is, it seems very dogmatic to me, especially when you're a woman. But I always get excused because I'm German.
Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
So after a while, if people won't accept your excuses, you stop looking for them.
