"With cities, leadership is real. It’s right on the ground; It’s literally and figuratively in your face. There’s no hiding. When you have fifteen inches of snow on the ground, you can’t make a speech and hope it goes away. If you’re at the supermarket, the barbershop, or walking down the street, people have things on their mind, and they want to talk to you. You have to listen. That’s a part of the job."
Tearing up the racial contract will demand a project of national reconstruction, the allocation of whose burdens will need to recognize the problems tens of millions of poor, working-class, and unemployed white Americans are facing also.
"I have a platform, and I want to use it to educate others. I knew that people were hungry for this conversation. To tell this on a much broader scale was our goal with producing COMPLEXion. As we started filming, we found that colorism was different in every culture. We really wanted to tell the human stories."
"My main criteria for taking a case is that nobody else will take it: The defendant is so hated, so maligned, so criticized, so despised, that they are a pariah. The worse they are regarded by people, the more likely it is that I will take their case."
"There is no doubt in my mind that the U.S. is going through one of the most critical periods in its history, and that its institutions are truly in danger – some of them have been damaged in a way that is going to be very difficult to repair."
"In the world right now, there are so many people who are trying to figure out solutions. And they’re working hard. We just don’t happen to know them. And so none of us can project from the current moment what the horizons of possibility are. So you have to be open to recognizing that the horizons of possibility can surprise you and that the best way to activate those positive surprises is to take the 'Failure is not an option' attitude."
"The greatest moments are when I realize that the film I thought I was making is totally different from where the film is going, and I have to throw the playbook out the window. That’s when I know I’m onto something because I’m expanding my perception."
"I’m someone with nothing to lose, because I don’t have corporate interests, I don’t have corporate allies – I’m not worried about whether I will get thrown out or whether my company gets thrown out of a country that we’ve criticized."
"The Palmyra Hotel is the story of every Lebanese living through the country’s ups and downs – from its Golden Era to what are now some of its worst days. And now more than ever, the Palmyra Hotel is a looking-glass for me. It is the perfect symbol of cross-cultural communication over time."
"If you want to really shift health equity in communities, you have to sit with community organizations and people asking questions in ways that community health workers do, who have understandings of communities in ways that physicians don’t."
