Quotes About Individuality

I don't want to be a chicken. I don't want to be a duck. So I shake my butt.

If your blood didn't flow, you would die, Arlo," said Andrea, who calls me by my real name because she knows I don't like it.

The girl was wearing a backward baseball cap and a black T-shirt that said LED ZEPPELIN on it. "Yo!" she said as she hopped off her skateboard. "They told me I was supposed to be in Mr. Granite's class. Are you Mr. Granite?" "Yes," Mr. Granite replied. "Who are you?" "My name is A.J.," the girl said, "and I hate school." WHAT?!

Everybody has to stand in a big circle and tuck their thumbs into their armpits. Then you have to flap your elbows like a chicken and cluck. Then you have to wiggle down to the floor and sing, "I don't want to be a chicken. I don't want to be a duck. So I shake my butt.

The next morning everybody was wearing the official school uniform. The boys had on light blue shirts, blue pants, and blue ties. The girls had on blue skirts with stripes on them. I looked like a dork. But everybody looked like a dork, so I didn't feel so bad.

On the morning of the wedding, my mom said I had to wear a jacket and tie. What's up with that? Why do men have to wear a dumb cloth around their neck? Whoever thought up that idea should get the Nobrain Prize. That's a prize they give to people who don't have brains.

My voice is the same

Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.

You can muck around with different guitars for certain bits, but you have to have your own sound. That's your benchmark, that's your sound. I also play a Black Beauty. It sounds amazing.

Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.

Diagnosed ill and off-kilter, poisoners, dreamers, madmen, lunatics, loners, sad ones, bad ones, star pegs in square holes, movers, shakers, mass debaters, tokers, pokers, instigators, conformity haters, subterfuge vessels and assassins of the vassals who lord over free and intelligent men with a dollar held high so that we jump until we die and know not of the pleasures of this life and the freedom of a soul unrestrained from the prison where the only fate is to hang.

When a mother "protects" a son by routinely correcting his father's style to match her own, she diminishes the opportunity for a genuine and uniquely valuable quality of parenting.

The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self-esteem intact while he is in school. That is the real risk to his success and to his mental health. Once he's out of school, the world will be different. He'll find a niche where the fact that he can't spell well, or didn't read until he was eight, won't matter. But if he starts to hate himself because he isn't good at

Teach boys that there are many ways to be a man.

everyone tells you what's good for you. they don't want you to find your own answers. they want you to believe theirs.

When first starting to work with someone you try to get them in the same mindset that you were in when you were successful, and I realized the best thing you can ever do is realize that they are not you. They have a different persona and mindset, and you have to figure out what works best within your communication with that athlete.

We now understand that the great American story is not confined to history books or political speeches. It is sung, and danced, and dramatized, and turned into verse. It is painted, and sculpted, and written, and filmed. Artists may not swear an oath to serve in government or the military, but they swear an oath to freedom of expression that is no less worthy of recognition, especially in a democracy such as ours.

We know that homosexuality is not limited to any race, religion, or socioeconomic class—it is part of human diversity.

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one - each and every one - because it offends your God.

So many therapists tell their patients how to think and how to feel. That is awfully wrong" (Erickson, Rossi, and Rossi 1976, 101).

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

At the age of 11 I was about 6 ft. tall and my voice had completely broken. That caused problems. I was this gangly, spotty, very unattractive kid. I wasn't cool and I wasn't a nerd. I didn't even want to fit in with anyone.