Kerry Washington Quotes

I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a loner. It’s been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what’s going on with me.

Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood.

the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.

We have the ability to be the heroes of our families, our communities and our lives. It's important to remind people of that truth: you have what it takes to make an impact. What is your hero's journey?

This is when the connection between art and social change became crystal clear to me. I started to understand the power of representation, the need for people to see themselves in the content they consume, but also the power of content to change how they think and feel and behave.

A few weeks ago, my manager asked: "Do you feel like you're back? I feel like you're back." She meant it as a total compliment, but we had this great conversation where I was like, "You know what? I try really hard not to use that language, because it's not about going backward in life." I think it comes from this culture of antiaging, which is so not loving ourselves. I've been really focused on not being "back" to anything, but being the best version of myself right now. My body is the site of a miracle now. I don't want to be pre-miracle.

My mother eventually explained that she was attempting to free me from chores to make time for me to pursue my passions. But shielding me from learning the logistics of self-care meant that I had been groomed for success, but not self-sufficiency. For some reason she didn't feel she could give me both.

I had abandoned myself

My prayer is that their spirits remain as powerful and buoyant on land as they are in the water. And in the light of day as well as at night.

I think it’s really important to take the stigma away from mental health… My brain and my heart are really important to me. I don’t know why I wouldn’t seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth.

Since at least the year 2000 and the election of George Bush, Americans have shown themselves to be increasingly enamored with the heroic couplet of men and stupidity. As the election in 2004 proved, playing dumb means playing to "the people," who, apparently, find intellectual acumen to be a sign of overeducation, elitism, and Washington insider status. As many critics have pointed out, no one could be more of a Washington insider than George W. Bush, the son of a former president and the brother of the governor of Florida. Even so, in both of his election campaigns Bush made a populist version of stupidity into a trademark and sold himself to the public as a down-home guy, a fun BBQpaI, a man's man, a student privileged enough to go to Yale but "real" enough to only get Cs-in other words, an inarticulate, monolingual buffoon who was a safe bet for the White House because he was not trying to befuddle an increasingly uneducated populace with facts, figures, or, god forbid, ideas. His opponent in the election, John Kerry, was fluent in French, well educated, well spoken, and highly suspicious on all counts.

Washington's all abstraction. It's about access to power and nothing else. I mean, I'm sure it's fun if you're living next door to Seinfeld, or To Wolfe, or Mike Bloomberg, but living next door to them isn't what New York is about, In Washington people literally talk about how many feet away from John Kerry's house their own house is. The neighborhoods are all so blah, the only thing that turns people on is proximity to power. It's a total fetish culture. People get this kind of orgasmic shiver when they tell you they sat next to Paul Wolfowitz at a conference or got invited to Grover Norquist's breakfast.

My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.” His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” That was Harriet Tubman in the 1800s. And let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So here’s to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes, people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black. And to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line. Thank you to the Television Academy. Thank you.

TO ACHIEVE THE peace between Israel and Arab states we had overcome many obstacles, none more enduring than the obsessive belief in the centrality of the Palestinian issue and the need to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace before any other peace could be made. John Kerry, like so many others, had held that belief, and he expressed it in December 2016 during a conference in Washington attended by many of my political opponents, invited especially from Israel to hear it: There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No, no, no and no… There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everyone needs to understand that. That is a hard reality. When Kerry finished delivering his remarks, he received thunderous applause. It was only by breaking out of this flawed way of thinking, however, that true progress was made. In its first seventy-two years, Israel made peace with two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan. In the span of four months, Israel had made peace with four more. By building Israel’s power and challenging Iran, we had made Israel an attractive ally to our Arab neighbors. By bypassing the Palestinians, we could now achieve four diplomatic breakthroughs and sign four historic agreements. This was truly a New Middle East, one built on real strength and no false illusions.

I was lucky to receive it. Most rogue interns never get a second chance. And here it’s worth mentioning that I benefited from what was known in 2009 as being fortunate, and is now more commonly called privilege. It’s not like I flashed an Ivy League gang sign and was handed a career. If I had stood on a street corner yelling, “I’m white and male, and the world owes me something!” it’s unlikely doors would have opened. What I did receive, however, was a string of conveniences, do-overs, and encouragements. My parents could help me pay rent for a few months out of school. I went to a university lousy with successful D.C. alumni. No less significantly, I avoided the barriers that would have loomed had I belonged to a different gender or race. Put another way, I had access to a network whether I was bullshit or not. A friend’s older brother worked as a speechwriter for John Kerry. When my Crisis Hut term expired, he helped me find an internship at West Wing Writers, a firm founded by former speechwriters for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. In the summer of 2009, my new bosses upgraded me to full-time employee. Without meaning to, I had stumbled upon the chance to learn a skill. The firm’s partners were four of the best writers in Washington, and each taught me something different. Vinca LaFleur helped me understand the benefits of subtle but well-timed alliteration. Paul Orzulak showed me how to coax speakers into revealing the main idea they hope to express. From Jeff Shesol, I learned that while speechwriting is as much art as craft, and no two sets of remarks are alike, there’s a reason most speechwriters punctuate long, flowy sentences with short, punchy ones. It works.

The rumor in Washington was that John Kerry was blocking the bill for one simple reason: he wanted to be secretary of state after Hillary Clinton resigned.

Civil rights demonstration in Washington, DC, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaking to crowd, June 14, 1963 (Warren

I see prime ministers and ministers and so on going to see Rupert [Murdoch] every time they go to Washington,’ he tells me. ‘The big problem for them is: who do you see first—the President or Rupert? I’m not in that brigade. I am available; I am here. I am representing a section of the Australian people as a result of their vote. I am not in the game of believing that empire must be paid obeisance—or else.

Nobody noticed the Kerry Washington opening that we did—they had done years ago with Jan Hooks. They did a similar sketch—Jan Hooks kept running out because a new woman was coming in. This was a year where they only had two women, and now the cast, the repertory cast, is 50 percent female for the first time, and it bothered me that why can’t we celebrate that? We’re not even allowed to say that in public because we don’t have a woman of the right color. We have two women of color, but they’re not the right color. It was an interesting, eye-opening experience just for race in America.

In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.’ That was Harriet Tubman in the 1800s. And let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So here’s to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes, people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black. And to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line. Thank you to the Television Academy. Thank you.

compliments were enough, but they weren’t. She wanted to do something, wanted Shakespeare and Company to be more than a diversion. Wanted Margaret and Jane to be seen as more than filthy Washington Squarites. Wanted Ulysses to have as broad an audience as possible. So many things to want. Just two years ago, she’d wanted a bookstore. Now she had it and she wanted more? Was that greed or ambition? Was there a difference?

Leaks are the way Washington DC communicates with itself. The fortress allows itself to be breached. The ship of state the same goes is the only ship that leaks from the top

It turned out that Kerry’s opposition to the Magnitsky Act had nothing to do with whether he thought it was good or bad policy. The rumor in Washington was that John Kerry was blocking the bill for one simple reason: he wanted to be secretary of state after Hillary Clinton resigned. According to the story making the rounds, one of the conditions for his getting the job was to make sure that the Magnitsky Act never saw the light of day at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

(Dimon also apparently wasn’t a fan of supporting the Seattle Art Museum, at least initially. When one of his lieutenants suggested that he continue to donate to the museum because Kerry and Linda Killinger had a named wing, and Bill Gates, Jr.’s mom was involved, Dimon exclaimed: “Are you fucking stupid? Why the fuck would I do that? I will honor whatever we legally have to honor. Are you going to tell me that Bill Gates doesn’t have enough money to support the museum?

Aku sungguh percaya bahwa jika aku menginginkan sesuatu, Tuhan mempunyai tiga jawaban. Ya; Ya, tetapi tidak sekarang; atau Tidak, karena Aku punya sesuatu yang lebih baik untukmu. Kerry Washington