Jennifer Beals quotes - page 3
Now, at this time, I think there's too many people who feel comfortable with hate speech. It's become too commonplace, and acceptable. And it's not okay, and we've got to change that...I think we also have to take responsibility for the words that come out of our mouths, because we are all connected. We are all part of one community.
Jennifer Beals
One of the things that the show did for me was bring up so many women's issues and the notion that homophobia is a form of misogyny. The women's community and the gay community are interrelated, whether you're straight or not. It also made me realize how connected women are everywhere. Women who are gay are repressed in similar ways as women who are straight.
Jennifer Beals
[Regarding Flashdance-related fame] It was very clear to me that it's not real. It's not real...I was never the little girl who thought I wanted to be famous. My first real quest that I can recall...other than wanting to be a jockey...was trying to figure out who or what God was. That really drove me for quite some time...I had a notion that there was this mystery that I didn't really know anything about, and I wanted to try to figure it out.... so fame was not my driving force.
Jennifer Beals
What's shocking is to see six-year-old children jump roping in the street at 2:00 a. m.-that's shocking-a block away from drug dealers. Just to see that the gap in the circle is education, in my mind, primarily for young women, because it's the young women that are raising the kids and that's where the circle, I think, perpetuates itself.
Jennifer Beals
With more mainstream filmmaking, the problem is who's making the decisions. They're not artists. The key creative decisions are being made by lawyers and accountants-that's a very precarious situation. It's precarious because it really does matter. Icons are being made and manufactured. People say it's just a movie-but it's not.
Jennifer Beals
[On the importance of positive representations of LGBT people in the media] You know, I don't think it's helpful to anyone to... for example, say that every LGBT person is wonderful and perfect and without flaw, and lets all ring the bells to perfection. I think it's much more helpful to tell the story as truthfully as you can, and with all of its complications, because that's also when people recognize themselves, and that's when people who are not part of the LGBT community will recognize themselves within that character. And then [they] hopefully empathize and maybe there'll be some kind of shift.
Jennifer Beals
I believe that people want to turn from fear towards hope, from divisiveness towards unity, from intolerance to an understanding that we all belong to one great community. Within all the chaos, within the despair, the not knowing, the anger, the anxiety, there is always the possibility for change. There is a seed of hope. And I'm not talking about a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, but a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to stand up and be counted - a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to give the very best of ourselves - not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all of us, collectively.
Jennifer Beals
[Speaking about the US military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy] The health of a democracy is directly dependent on hearing the voices of its individual citizens. Silence is destructive. What could mar our safety more than this restrictive policy that requires its citizens' silence? What could mar our safety more than this restrictive policy that quietly attacks its own citizens' very selfhood out of fear? What keeps us truly unsafe as a country on a day-to-day basis is our inability to look inside and experience ourselves as a multitude, as a complexity. And as sure as I'm standing here, things are not always black or white, but sometimes they can be both.
Jennifer Beals
