Top 55 John Ridley Quotes

As an ex-stand up, I can tell you that a comedy club isn’t a place you go looking to get the abuse you just can’t seem to find in daily life. The stage is a performer’s domain. You protect that domain. You are not on stage to take what’s given just ’cause you’re getting paid. If you are attacked, you retaliate.

If faux liberal white guys want to support and defend Obama, by all means please do so. But I would suggest they try to limit that support to matters of policy and not perspectives on race.

I don’t want an underachiever working on my car’s transmission. Why would I want someone regular sitting in the Oval Office? Sorry, give me somebody who has demonstrated a capacity to excel.

I’m sorry, but chick fights are sexy. If you don’t think so, you’re either an uptight woman or a lying man.

If the American public is so into morality in movies, why don’t they throw more of their disposable income at religious-themed entertainment? For every ‘Passion of the Christ,’ there’s a ‘Fireproof’ that comes and goes with no notice.

Let’s be very clear: Living ‘unforgiven’ is not the sole domain of blacks. It can be found in any successful person.

I got a call saying that George Lucas wanted to meet me. Of all the phone calls I’ve received – Oliver Stone wants to meet you; Spike Lee wants to meet you – that was the one call I never in a million years thought was going to happen.

I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

The great thing about working with NPR – and, really, there’s like a million of ’em – is all the cool stuff I get to do for the public. Meet the president. Hang out at the National Finals Rodeo in Vegas. Drink a $10,000 martini.

Fact is, awards shows were never really about recognizing achievement. They were a publicity ploy cooked up in the late 1920s by MGM topper Louie Mayer and his newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which was itself, back in the day, nothing but a front organization to discourage unionizing.

Bad news: Complainers are rewarded for complaining. Indicative of the victim culture in which we live, people have not only come to expect something for nothing, but are then rewarded for how loudly they can ventilate their sense of having been victims of fraud.

When it comes to fighting for freedom, those who are willing to fight should not be limited by our bigotry. Only rewarded with our gratitude.

For the vast majority of those who are obese – those with a Body Mass Index over 30 – their size is their choice. They choose to take in more calories than they burn. They choose to take in high fat calories over low-fat ones. They choose to fad diet, if they choose to diet at all.

Not only does Hollywood make money – it seems to make better movies during recessions. I’m sure a lot of studio executives wish we could have one every year.

Bigots are actually funny to me in the way that people who still wear parachute pants give me a chuckle.

It’s funny: over time, if you’re fortunate, you build a nice career, and you have these interesting moments, and I would not, looking back, trade any of them – ‘Red Tails,’ ’12 Years a Slave’ and ‘Undercover Brother.’

It’s not that white guys shouldn’t be allowed to engage in discussions on race in America. But there’s nothing more exhausting than white male liberals’ dogmatisms on race that were clearly formed during a conversation they had with that one black guy they met back in college.

If art is singular expression, then by nature, the best art is controversial. But when art stirs debate for reasons besides its artistic integrity, that’s when things get bent.

There are some individuals who look at graphic novels as ‘canon,’ and they cannot change in any way, shape or form, and that’s what makes them in some ways good fans.

Slavery is something that affects all of us. It’s all of our history.

As a coping mechanism, or as a way to make a little hard count by shilling demons in the shadows, I try not to belittle the thought process of the conspiracy theorists. As a cocktail waitress in Vegas once schooled me: never get down on anybody else’s hustle.

I like animals. I like people who like animals. I hate people who love animals to the point they lose their sense of reason. I’m talking the ‘my computer wallpaper is my dog,’ ‘I hang a Christmas stocking for my cat’ crowd.

When times are tough, people want to escape to somewhere fantastic without having to pay actual escape-to-somewhere-fantastic cash. And offering a couple of hours away from the ordinary is what the movies do best.

The thing about working in Hollywood is that, at some point, you really get tired of hearing how godless you are, and how if you and the rest of the heathens in Tinsel town would put more God-centric shows on TV, people wouldn’t be abandoning prime time in favor of their Bible study classes.

Facts tend to take the punch out of a good hate rant and are therefore left best unsaid.

Awards shows have devolved into self-parodies – liberals in limos, corny insider jokes delivered by the hosts among bad teleprompter reading from the some of the best thespians on the planet.

I still have my first ‘Black Lightning’ that I got way back in the day, and my first ‘Steel.’ And I proudly display those comics, by the way. I have a lot of comics, but those are among the ones that mean the most to me.

I don’t think I’m alarmist. I’m more disappointed by the euphemisms in some instances than outright bigotry. Now, to me, you walk around with a Klan hat on or you’ve got a swastika on you arm, you just look like a dope, you know what I mean?

I understand politicos gotta make bank. But cloistering with the Hollywood elite is not how you prove you’re a man of the people.

Being of color in America by no means amounts to a constant barrage of negativity. However, unlike being white, being of color means one’s race is a constant issue.

Obama is the New Generation and the hot light of a dawn that goes way beyond clever talk of morning in America.

As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an ‘other’ in America is I really feel like you’re bilingual. I’m from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I’m in New York and I’m working for MSNBC or CNN, you’re used to being the only black person in the room.

I’m John the Fourth, so I think there’s a lot of things in life that have been truly handed to me by the hard work and the pain of others.

To this day, the only argument against Obama that critics can seem to come up with involves admitting he’s better than them – though they certainly season it with some racism. You know, he’s that lucky black man who actually appeals to the populace. He’s that elitist who got himself off food stamps and into Harvard.

Why do we cling to bigotry? Because bigotry, plainly, is convenient. It is a near-effortless way to both elevate one’s stature and make a pity grab in this culture of victims that we have become.

There is not a country on earth whose people don’t deserve to be free and safe.

If some of us can get an Oscar for extolling that it’s hard out there for a pimp, why can’t others of us admonish: ‘Then quit acting like a pimp’?

Fanboys are a creator’s blessing and curse. If a fanboy likes you, they love you. Obsessively. If you cross them with some plot point or story direction they reject, expect to be wholly and continually eviscerated across the Internet.

Even I haven’t downed enough L.A. Kool-Aid to believe that somehow Hollywood movies are an overt instrument of morality.

I love graphic novels – I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I’m savvy enough to do them in the right way.

It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans – those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue of his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

Why is it that the very people who have fought so hard and so long for the simple entitlement to love whom they choose to love are the very ones denied that right by those who routinely take their vows for granted?

In every election cycle that I can recall, there comes a moment – or a few – where charges of elitism and claims of commonness are wielded by presidential candidates like a sword and shield: ‘Vote for me ’cause I’m one of you. It’s the other guy who’s out of touch.’

I can tell you from personal experience it gets a little tiring having to make the rounds on cable shows to explain ‘what’s up with black folks.’

Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation. But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

Governmental intervention and personal responsibility are not mutually exclusive issues, but they do frame a ‘do it ourselves’ vs. ‘what are you doing for us’ debate. For the black community, that’s a debate that’s been raging at least as far back as the W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington philosophical grudge matches.