Hilary Mantel Quotes

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

The struggle for human rights and democracy are not always the same thing. Sometimes what you have to do is break cultural attitudes. Democracies aren’t necessarily very good at that…. It’s very hard for oppressed minorities to be given their due.

Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.

I have in my bones, and in my blood, the knowledge that you have to help the people who are persecuted.

I fight against racism and bigotry because I care about the people who are experiencing it.

They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I've been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can't be in for any form of discrimination at all.

Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Costs are incurred whenever any group is treated as lesser or the other, whether they are women, racial, or religious minorities, or the LGBT.

It's not surprising that truly humanitarian manifestos originate frequently in minority circles or with people whose consciences are troubled by the problems of minorities.

Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice; by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant; by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.

Anywhere where the humanity of people is undermined, anywhere where people are left in the dust, there we will find our cause.

There's the continuing challenges of racism, of sexism, of discrimination against the LGBT community, of the way that we treat people as opposed to how we want to be treated.

In this town [L.A], I guess it takes homosexuals to be discriminated against in order for someone to finally step UP and wanna do something.

When people call me illegal, calling me illegal says more about you than it does about me.

God knows, as a minority, gay people have taken serious lumps for their sexual preferences. As has every minority.

We should treat each other better. Why in the hell would you still have racism? This ancient, moronic hatred? Why does our foreign policy have to always involve so much death and so much death of innocent people as a matter of course, to the point to where no one bothers to say anything. I guess a lot of people don't want to move forward. It's frustrating at times.

In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

In any marginalized community, whether people identify themselves or not affects us all.

When a church manipulates the law to say, "These people are lesser," it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, "I am not lesser!" Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.

I think it's ridiculous that we even have to talk about gay rights as rights...It's gonna be as shocking as the treatment of slaves someday.

Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.

I don't get this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.

Discrimination is discrimination no matter who the victim is, and it is always wrong. There are no special rights in America, despite the attempts by many to divide blacks and the gay community with the argument that the latter are seeking some imaginary special rights at the expense of blacks.

I think most gypsies all over the world are used to being not really welcome and always on the run, expecting people to not like them and to be critical.