All American Boys Quotes
"Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left! Your left! Your left! Your left-right-left!"
"Friday was just another word for party."
"Let me tell you something, son... The only people who are going to live in this house are people I’m making love to."
"There’s no better opportunity for a black boy in this country than to join the army."
"Don’t be smart... You don’t need discipline? You don’t need to travel the world?"
"You don’t understand... I have money right here!"
"Oh, you wanna resist? You wanna resist?"
"I’m doing the best I can here... I need your help to help your brother."
"It's about how the world looks at you and when they do, who do you want them to see?"
"If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck..."
"It's not that big a deal. It won't happen again."
"He got to the store, just to get gum and chips."
"It just ain’t right. And you know me. You know I’m not gonna sit here and let them sweep this under the rug, like this is okay."
"You’re the one your brother looks up to."
"You have more important things to worry about, young man."
"What kind of a person do you want to be? Who do you think you are?"
"I don’t have a problem with a good prayer. I mean, I believe in God. At least I think I do."
"Nobody wanted to hear the truth, even though everybody already knew what it was."
"That God was there. That God was always there. Which, to me, is the wrong thing to say."
"I would much rather Pastor Johnson say that God wasn’t there. That he was busy."
"I just wondered where God was when I was being mopped by that cop."
"Anything longer than that made me uncomfortable."
"Violated. That’s the only way I can put it. Straight-up violated."
"How could I be that boy—a victim. Me. It was just surreal."
"Nobody says the words anymore, but somehow the violence still remains."
"If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do a hell of a lot more than just say the right things and not say the wrong things."
"Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human."
"But I’m telling you that I’ve been watching the news, and I see what’s going on. There’s something that ain’t healed, and it’s not just those ribs of yours."
"I wish I could have gone. But I had basketball. But I have to do something!"
"The numbers don’t lie, kids. The numbers always tell a story."
"Maybe right now all I saw were teammates around me, but once we stepped back into the real world, who did I see?"
"I saw what I saw on the street. That was the real story."
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
"Our silence is another kind of violence."
"I’m already there, Ma. I was there Friday night. Ma, I saw it. I’m right in the middle of it, which is why I can’t do nothing."
"Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! We had to stand up and say something about it too, because otherwise it was just like what one of those posters in the crowd outside school said: Our silence is another kind of violence."
"We are here to say, enough is enough! We are here to say, no more! No more!"
"I wanted him to know that I saw him, a guy who, even with a tear-streaked face, seemed to have two tiny smiles framing his eyes like parentheses, a guy on the ground pantomiming his death to remind the world he was alive."
"For all the people who came before us, fighting this fight, I was here, screaming at the top of my lungs."