Rebecca Hall Quotes

Gays seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order: no matter how far down the pecking order another group is, its members still feel superior to and have no problem picking on gays.

Our family were outsiders, and I've always had a sense of the outsider, the underdog, and a strong sense of justice towards people who are excluded.

I'm drawn to people who find themselves on the outside of things. I'm moved by that in real life.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.

The trouble with discrimination is not discrimination per se, but rather that the people who are discriminated against think of themselves as second-class.

Both casual, unthinking discrimination and deliberate, malicious homophobia erode self-confidence and undermine mental health. Both are far too common, not just in our schoolyards or online but in sporting clubs, in the outer and even in our national parliament.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.

We see people talking to themselves all the time. We always have. Particularly if they're homeless people or at all questionable, there's a sense of, 'That guy's crazy!' I see that now with a much more empathetic eye.

I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.

It's easier to say people are crazy than to try to figure out why.

Growing up as a gay boy in West Texas, I definitely felt like a bit of an outcast sometimes - that there was a world that I would never be a part of.

Pick any scientific field, and you'll find that those snubbed by their communities, left feeling alone and despised, were often those on the forefront.

If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal,' or that chilling American word 'alien,' then what has become of our own humanity?

The proliferation of bans fuels stereotypes and discriminates against a community.

I saw in my life what pushed a lot of people to drugs was being an outcast to society, so being gay I related to that.

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.

The people that are the invisible ones, the marginalized, the quote-unquote weirdos, the people that get things thrown at them, the people that get harassed every day just for existing . . . I just still strongly align with them.

This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.

We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

It is a crime and a sin to regard a person as untouchable because he is born in a particular community.

It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.