Spike Lee Quotes

Parents kill more dreams than anybody.

Fate, however, has a way of finding your vulnerabilities where you least expect them, illuminating them so that you realize how glaringly obvious they are, and then mercilessly driving a spike straight into their most delicate center.

Always be mine, puppy please, puppy please.

Do the right thing.

Spike Lee was the voice depicting the ills of social issues. Joseph Strickland will depict the spiritual issues (or ills) from within. ("The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style," 2018)

How can Martin Scorsese’s New York City be the same as Woody Allen’s New York City, which is not the same thing as Spike Lee’s New York City and Mike Nichols’s New York City? That was my introduction to perspective.

Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine.

Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes, said Fate, although he didn't really. "He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz. "Maybe," said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it." "And what about Woody Allen?" "I like him," said Fate. "He seems Mexican too...

Night odours come drifting from woods and gardens; sweet musks and sharp green acids. In the sky the fat stars bounce up and down, rhythmically, as we trudge along. Glow-worms, brighter than lamps or candles, spike the fields with their lemon fires, while huge horned beetles stumble out of the dark and buzz blindly around our heads.

And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Do the right thing

People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.

I swear before God... and four more white people! This is the last time!

It’s time to step up and start making examples out of people. Decent citizens black and white should not have to live in fear of urban terrorists. The elderly man who marched for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s should not have to live in fear because some Robin Hoodlum doesn’t know how to honor the social contract. Young people who are trying to do the right thing, shouldn’t have to live in fear because a bunch of cast extras from a Spike Lee film don’t know how to behave.

On Floriography This poem explores the ancient practice of floriography, the coded language of flowers, as a way to express human love through the use of fragrance, colors, and vivid symbolism. By elucidating the phenomenon of florescence alongside the art of floral arrangement, the poem encourages readers to extract poetry and beauty out of a dystopic world. If you often find yourself at a loss for words or don’t know what to say to those you love, just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia of civilization rendered fragrant, blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife, heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover beckoning to say without bruising a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes, or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo in the gloaming— what to say to those whom you love in this world? Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it, Say it with flowers. —Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.

In 2014—one year after Dasani competed in a track competition at the Pratt Institute—Spike Lee stood onstage there during Black History Month, delivering a rant against gentrification. “Then comes motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” fumed Lee. “You can’t discover this! We been here.” He went on to compare Fort Greene Park to the Westminster Dog Show, “with twenty thousand dogs running around,” while lamenting how his father, a jazz musician who had purchased his home in 1968, was playing acoustic bass when his new neighbors, in 2013, called the police. “You just can’t come in where people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here?” The same forces are reshaping Bed-Stuy, the historic neighborhood where Dasani’s great-grandfather June first landed and where her teacher, Miss Hester, still lives. Around the corner from her basement rental, a trendy café now sells $4 espressos. Miss Hester resents the neighborhood’s white transplants, walking around “as if I am the outsider, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me I was born here!’ 

As expected, Nevada’s summer heat was oppressive; temperatures under the desert sun bubbled around the 130-degree mark, which made it even harder for Monroe and almost everyone except [Clark] Gable to put in a full day’s work. Though he had a chauffeured limousine at his disposal, he drove himself back and forth to work in his silver Mercedes-Benz SC. He always arrived punctually at eight-forty-five A.M., bringing along gallon Thermoses of booze-spiked lemonade and iced tea to fortify himself. For the better part of the morning, he would sit around studying that day’s script pages or gabbing with the crew while waiting for the other principals to arrive. Though the delays were driving him mad, he tried not to show it. But one day while his writer-friend John Lee Mahin was visiting from Los Angeles, Gable told him, “It’s not professional, John, it’s stealing. It’s stealing the bank’s money and United Artists’ money. I don’t see how they’re going to get a picture out of this, but I’m stuck with it now, and I’m trying to do the best I can. It’s been hard on me.

Spike Lee’s School Daze and Sidney Poitier’s To Sir with Love

Cheris, people are very simple,” Jedao said. “You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down.

Well, Strictly Business (1991) got one of the highest ratings ever from a test screening - and that movie was a piece of shit.

* Use sitting for most climbs, especially when in a group   Sitting is the most efficient way to climb and the most common climbing position. Sitting is good for economy and endurance.   When you stand you use about 12% more oxygen and spike your heart rate by about 8% so it makes sense to stay seated as often as you can.

Use sitting for most climbs, especially when in a group   Sitting is the most efficient way to climb and the most common climbing position. Sitting is good for economy and endurance.   When you stand you use about 12% more oxygen and spike your heart rate by about 8% so it makes sense to stay seated as often as you can.

bradawl. It was just a blunt steel spike set into a handle.

For example, political scientist Manning Marable said of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Ethnically, Thomas has ceased to be an African American.” Columnist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post wrote of black economist Thomas Sowell, “Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage as Sowell is doing.” And Spike Lee said that Michael Williams, a black appointee in the Bush administration, was such a traitor to his race that he deserved to be “dragged into an alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”39

watching TV. Plus, at the age of 4 years old, it was time for him to see what was going on in the world. After all, he wasn’t getting any younger. Spike stood up and quickly walked out of the kitchen to the living room. The living room was one of Spike’s favorite places in the house. His favorite cushion was on the other side

So, too, rose the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blues that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day. So, too, came the people who might not have existed, or become who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.

So, too, came the people who might not have existed, or became who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.

Any room for one more?’ I said. ‘Sorry old boy, this is a one-man trench.’ I dived in head first as fresh shells landed. ‘Well now it’s a bloody two-man trench.’ I tell you! They are willing to let you die rather than move over! The shelling stopped. I got out and returned to duty – more shells – I found a small depression in the lee of some rocks. ‘Where are you,’ shouted a voice. ‘I’m in a depression,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we all,’ was the reply.

Let me tell you the story of right hand left hand. It's a tale of good and evil. HATE: It was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. LOVE: These five fingers- they go straight through the soul of man. The right hand; the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand. Your left hand is kickin' much ass. I mean it looks like the right hand love is finished... but hold on, stop the presses, the right hands comin' back! Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now- that's right! Yeah! Ooh, it's a devastating right, an hate is hurt! Dowwn! Oooh! Oooh, left hand hate killed by love. ...- If I love you, I love you. But if I hate you... [There it is, love and hate] I love you, bro. [Thank you.] - Radio Raheem

One by one the Essence Awards honorees were called onto the stage. First went civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, then movie director Spike Lee, followed by comedian Eddie Murphy, and then Dr. Benjamin S. Carson. Ben stood and walked forward to the stage. It was one of the most surreal moments of his life. He wondered how he belonged in the same category as those around him on the stage. It was hard for him to imagine that he, a pediatric neurosurgeon, was being publicly honored along with the most recognizable African American men and women in the country. As he stood onstage, staring out at the crowd, Ben thought about the path his life had taken. Who could have guessed that he, a poor black boy from a single-parent home in Detroit, would end up a brain surgeon? Certainly not those who had considered him the class dummy back in elementary school. Here he was, not just a brain surgeon, but a brain surgeon being honored for the work he had undertaken—experimental surgeries that gave children a chance at life.

SOME YEARS AGO, I read the following quote from Spike Lee and thought instantly of my time at UNC: “It comes down to this,” he said. “Black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it’s been a quest since then to define who we are.

You occupy the conscious mind with one thing, then drive a spike into the subconscious mind with something else while the walls are down.

Mina Lee was right. The isolation is driving us crazy. We just hadn’t realized it yet.” “Not the isolation. The mad science experiments. They’ve spiked the water with hallucinogens.

I thought I saw someone.” “Where?” “I--I--” He looked around. “I don’t know. Down there maybe?” He pointed along the wharf. “I was running after you and it happened so fast, I didn’t get a good look.” “Was it a man? Woman? Young? Old?” “I’m…not sure.” He exhaled and leaned against the wall. “Okay, that sounds nuts. I’m not even sure I saw someone.” “You sensed someone?” He made a face. “Now that really sounds nuts.” “Hey, if you’re okay with me imagining myself as a pine marten, I’m okay with you sensing unseen assailants.” He laughed. “Mina Lee was right. The isolation is driving us crazy. We just hadn’t realized it yet.” “Not the isolation. The mad science experiments. They’ve spiked the water with hallucinogens.