A Quote by Catriona Gray

Let's cultivate an environment, not just in beauty pageants but in society in general, where we argue like we're right but listen like we're wrong.

Catriona Gray

Quote Topics

Beauty Society Argue Beauty Pageant Cultivate Environment General Just Like Listen Right Wrong

Quote Author

Catriona Gray
Filipino - Model
Born: January 6, 1994

I never went in thinking, "You're an African-American woman, so you're never going to win." I was just in career doing beauty pageants for the experience, and to show my brains and talent and help break stereotypes. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'll become a star. I'm beautiful." I never thought I was pretty. I couldn't even put on eyelashes or makeup. When you come from an environment that's military, and they don't stress that topic of aesthetics or beauty pageants and makeup, there are a lot of things you just don't have that city girls have.

Pam Grier

I felt like I was not a cute kid, and I remember seeing people transform. It was actually when my sister was in the beauty pageants and I was in some pageants. I didn't win any. I always got that like, participant trophy, but I fell in love with the way makeup could transform people.

Huda Kattan

But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.

Guy Spier

When you come from an environment that's military, and they don't stress that topic of aesthetics or beauty pageants and makeup, there are a lot of things you just don't have that city girls have. Or the country girl who goes to movies and dreams of going to Hollywood as an actress.

Pam Grier

Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.

Michelle Dean

My grandma loves beauty pageants, like most of Latin American culture, but it's not for me.

Stephanie Sigman

If you think beauty pageants are all about perfections, then I am sorry to say, it is not like that.

Harnaaz Sandhu

It's difficult to really be an artist nowadays. People are just on another page. You have a society that needs you to say something, but they don't want to give you the environment to be able to be just a functioning, happy, normal person. It's like, the industry is at odds with you, the society is at odds with you. You start to live in this very confined box where it's like, It's "me" and "them."

Mos Def

I would like to show that I have a heart, that I am a human being and I have feelings. And to be this kind of role model, not only for beauty pageants but also for life.

Gabriela Isler

Competing in pageants made me hyper-aware of the unfair expectations society places on women in terms of youth and beauty. But it also gave me empathy for women who use beauty as a creative exploration. When expressed healthfully, dressing up, doing hair, crafting makeup, etc., is an art form.

Rae Carson

I do like people who are popular across the years and stuff like that, but I'm not a big pop music fan. I don't listen to the radio unless it's KCRW, like Booka Shade. Yeah, like weird music is what I'm really into right now. But I like anything really. There's just so much. I buy new music almost every day, so there's so much coming in that I don't even have time to listen to something more that twice.

Ashley Tisdale

The song succeeds or fails just based on whether you argue your point successfully. I like throwing images together, which create meaning if you listen to it one time, but if you listen to it another time you might get a different meaning.

Iron & Wine

That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and as a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American, we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, if we’ve progressed as a society, then you don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.

Kobe Bryant

I like to listen to African music; I like to listen to Brazilian music that's not just Choro. I love to listen to Radiohead, I like to listen to James Brown - any music.

Anat Cohen

I feel myself always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic, local fact which, like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be itself. Nationality is not a principle; it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principal of freedom.