“When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at...” — Anna Deavere Smith Quote

“When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.”

“I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.”

“You know, all kinds of people inspire me.”

“Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.”

“I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.”

“I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.”

“The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.”

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.”

“The right combination is between a free economy and social policy that addresses the needs of society and creates equal opportunity.”

“To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.”

“Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.”