121 Quotes by Tavis Smiley

This is not a skill problem, this is a will problem. Does America have the will to make education a priority? We know the things that work. Why don’t we scale up those things that do work.

When it comes to the president, we have to respect him, we have to protect him, and we have to correct him. And in my career, since he’d been on the national stage at least, I’ve had – I’ve always respected the president.

The old African proverb says, ‘The ax forgets; the tree remembers.’ I saw how horrifically it injured us to identify with our oppressors. If we were to keep our souls whole, we couldn’t afford to forget. We had to remember.

I use the phrase “fellow citizen” all the time when referring to the – people always say, “The American people, the American people.” I prefer the phrase fellow citizen because there’s a power in that, there’s a responsibility, there’s a duty in using that phrase fellow citizen.

All he could think of was how all people require attention. All people require respect. All people require acknowledgment. All people require love.

I learned early on that it’s heartbreaking to – there’s the editor that comes in, and then they have to craft the movie together, and sometimes you give a whole performance that’s just been cut up, and maybe it’s better for it, absolutely, but you still have to deal with the loss of that.

I can’t count the number of people I’ve talked to over the course of my career who have said to me that the thing that they most regret is the one time they did something just for the money.

Live just because or live your life for a cause.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, ’the soft bigotry of low expectations.