Cal Cunningham Quotes

The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity.

Women have to be very vigilant, and demand the very best in public schools, health care and pay, those things that men and women of this state value are at risk.

When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.

All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother's Keeper, I'm personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

It is inexcusable that the richest country in the world does not take care of all of its people. We don't consider ourselves idealistic; we're thoughtfully trying to make a beautiful health care model.

We have a country that wants to believe it is the best in everything, but until all of us embrace the idea that health care should be a right, not a privilege, our system cannot be glibly described as, quote, 'the best in the world.'

Cost containment too often becomes care containment. And it affects the least powerful population sector with the quietest voice.

How can we continue to condone a system which heals those who can pay but says to hell with those who can't.

There is a lot of inequality in Colombia. We have to correct that.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

If anything, the genuine human struggles in 'Sicko' raise questions about our society that run much deeper than what passes for political discourse today. Why does such a rich nation let people suffer and die without health care?

We still live in a country where there's disproportionate violence faced by our community, especially trans people and trans people of color. I think activism within the queer community continues to need to focus on those issues first.

Poverty, the racial divide and social injustice do not impact only those who suffer most visibly. Alleviating poverty and injustice is a responsibility we must never forget or abandon.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

I think what we forget is that everybody loses when we keep unnecessary privilege. The cost to society overall is much greater.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

One of the great conundrums in philanthropy globally is that the way wealth creation happens itself often creates the inequities in society.

All New Yorkers have the right to decent housing, regardless of income and rent.

I think that the people who come from communities like me as an African-American woman, as a member of the LGBT community, we haven't sat in the corners of power.

What we were all always saying with 'The Wire' was that there's a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they'd get rid of them. They are Americans - they're worth saving; they're worth helping.