Ossie Davis

"Performing artists are less political today than they were years ago because they're not called on to be political"

"We have freedom. What we don't have is equality!"

"They knew what to say because it fell into the existing rhetoric"

"The struggle and the arts are connected almost by definition"

"I had a sense of certainty that no matter how dark it is now, one of these days it'll change."

"Optimism is small and personal"

"One of the traps we've tried to avoid is the presentation of ourselves as victims or beggars"

"We're going somewhere, even if it's only around the Goddamn corner"

"when the time comes we'll give each other our own Oscar and attend our own funerals and screw the rest of it if necessary"

"Colorblind casting shouldn't violate common sense"

"Criticism used to be an art practiced by educated people. Now you don't know what any of them are looking for in anything"

"I have less opportunities than I used to, but I don't think there's any prejudice against me because of my age"

"Art has a deep responsibility, social, cultural, and otherwise. And that the basic motivation for the creation of art is, in a sense, to meet those responsibilities. Now, it doesn't mean that you cannot express yourself in any way you want to, but it takes place in a social context, whether you mean it to do so or not"

"I fully expected that a black man particularly would by lynched from time to time because it was going on when I came into the world"

"It was a tradition that had gone all the way back into slavery, as long as we knew ourselves, we knew this as a part of the world in which we lived. We related to it on an individual basis, as it happened, we related to the incidents."

"We knew that if we lived within those parameters there was a world, that was really to some degree a safe world, and a world that provided us, reaffirmed us as to whom we were because it was a black world"

"But there were limits of the power that the black community had. It could not punish those from the outside who wrought crime against us, it could not demand that justice be done, it could beg, it could pray, you know, it could cajole, it could wheedle, you know, but it could never insist, and we knew that that was a limit"

"We were not by any means a helpless community, cowering against, under the boot heel of the oppressor"

"Blacks are by and large are still, in a majority sense, Democrats"

"If you can’t outfight the man, outsmart him"

"in the end it is history that will tell the story"

"The history of the black man on the frontier – and, indeed, the history of the Indian – has never really been paid attention to in the movies."

"There is a lot of American history waiting to be rediscovered, once you get away from the official version"

"I would say that a deeper patriotism is required when we consider to whom we owe our patriotic response"

"I come together to say, I choose to live for brotherhood and not for folly. I choose peace and not war. I choose life and not death."

"I don’t think being a celebrity or being anything else overrides the responsibility to be a decent, humane citizen"

"I’d hate to go to hell and say I was busy trying to save the Oscars"

"Mankind, humankind is at stake"

"Peace, peace, peace. This is where it’s at, and this is where I am."