Blacklist Quotes

“On the board was a list of words and phrases which her mother considered not suitable for use in college T-shirt design. She had been asked about them so often that in the end she had started a blacklist of banned words to which everyone could refer. Every time someone thought of a new one, she unflinchingly wrote it down ...
Rose read through the list, and turned back to her letter.
These are the words I learned to spell in Mummy's art class today, she wrote, and sighed a little as she began the tedious job of copying from the board.”

— Hilary McKay

“A group of people you know who are in your whitelist or your blacklist can intertwine when you have a deep understanding to adapt to each individual's stereotype and they would all eventually accept of who you are.”

— Saaif Alam

“To my knowledge, there is no blacklist. But there is a mindset, even among liberal producers, that says 'He may be difficult, so let's avoid him.'”

— Ed Asner

“Not a single person I named hadn't already been named at least a half-dozen times and wasn't already on he blacklist.”

— Edward Dmytryk

“There's always some kind of blacklist throughout history. But the difference is, in America they usually let you live.”

— Rip Torn

“When I first came to Hollywood, the blacklist was just starting, and they were having hearings in Washington. What most people don't know is the judge of these hearings himself was later convicted of misappropriation. 'Spartacus' helped break the blacklist, because Spartacus was a real character.”

— Kirk Douglas

“We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.”

— Langston Hughes

“I'm so happy with 'The Blacklist.' Give me more people to shoot and throw them off buildings.”

— Diego Klattenhoff

“I can't tell you how good it is to go from 'Homeland' to be lucky enough to find 'The Blacklist' at the right time. It literally came at the very end of pilot season when I thought there was nothing left.”

— Diego Klattenhoff

“Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don't remember and the Watts rioting you do - it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day. And then maybe some playful soul shows up with a bucketful of piranhas, dumps them in the pool, and right away they can taste the blood. They swim around looking for what's bleeding, but they don't find anything, all of them getting more and more crazy, till the craziness reaches a point. Which is when they begin to feed on each other.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“Boards without women - blacklist those suckers. It's 2011. They've had the time - it's significant that they don't have women.”

— Anne M. Mulcahy

“If 'The Blacklist' taught me anything, it was kind of open-ended intrigue and leaving questions unanswered. Creating this kind of mystery by virtue of depriving the audience of these easy answers was what I was kind of into.”

— Joe Carnahan

“'The Blacklist' was really right place, right time. I read the script and met with Jon Bokenkamp, John Eisendrath, John Fox and John Davis, and we just hit it off. They understood that I was not so much trying to adapt to television, but adapt a cinematic style to the things that we were gonna do.”

— Joe Carnahan

“I was living in a terrible time when people were being accused of being communists, and they attacked the movie industry, especially the writers. People couldn't work if they were on the blacklist. The studios banned them. It was the most onerous period in movie history. I don't think we have ever had a period so dark as that.”

— Kirk Douglas

“You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but Earl Blackwell finally died, and I was on his blacklist every year for being the worst dressed person.”

— Meryl Streep

“I would rather quit public life at seventy, and quit it forever, than to retain public life at a sacrifice to my own self-respect. I will not vote for any law which will make fair for me and foul for another. The blacklist is the most cruel form of oppression ever devised by man for the infliction of suffering upon his weaker fellows.”

— Joseph Gurney Cannon

“The blacklist was a time of evil ... no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil ... [Looking] back on this time ... it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims.”

— Dalton Trumbo

“The stuff that I've been doing lately is political. It's not always about people who are super famous movie stars. The fact that people are still taking a chance and listening to the blacklist episodes is really exciting.”

— Karina Longworth

“There is no blacklist. In the first place, in the entertainment business, money talks, bullshit walks. So Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins won't be blacklisted because they are bankable stars. In the second place, if you are a woman, the only things you're going to be blacklisted for in Hollywood are body fat and aging.”

— Janeane Garofalo

“L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling was recorded on tape making racist comments. He now has been banned from the league for life. Great, just where Sterling wanted to end up - the blacklist.”

— Jimmy Fallon

“If you've got a blacklist, I want to be on it.”

— Billy Bragg