Quotes About Labels

Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.

the homosexual,' 'the Negro,' and 'the female' are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good.

Pero el nombre y el apellido no hacen a una persona ni determinan qué va a ser, como bien has demostrado.

Oh great, you too. So now I wear this label 'Queer' emblazoned across my chest. Or I could always carve a scarlet 'L' on my forehead. Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it? I don't know what I am—polymorphous and perverse. Shit. I don't even know if I'm white. I'm me. That's all I am and all I want to be. Do I have to be something?

This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone's side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God's side.

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

I've always felt a certain guilt to have them labeled as 'Christina's sisters' or, 'That's Christina's mom' but them looking for the respect to be named Elizabeth and Danielle and Carmen.

A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.' Quite often men are fools.

It seems like -- especially in religious circles and Christian circles, we want to first talk about the things we're opposed to. That means we have to categorize that person. We can call them emergent or neo orthodox or someone who feminizes scripture. There's the category, let's stick them in the category then just blow up the box and him along with it.

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

If you'd called me an ox, I'd have said I was an ox; if you'd called me a horse, I'd have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you'll only lay yourself open to double harassment.

When labels start coming into our heads (loathsome, ugly, loser, winner), we should question them—recognize a label as the insubstantial thing it is, and let it go.

The ways schools were organized (the homogeneous tracks, the division of students by age), their scale of virtues (where the worst sins involved talking out of turn or not standing properly in line, while generosity was barely noticed), the labels "academic" and "nonacademic" all offered glimpses into social history. Why, for example, was putting together a student newspaper nonacademic, whereas lessons in handwriting or filling in multiple-choice workbooks were academic?

When asked the secret of how to look at the world afresh, with delighted eyes, Merlin said, "You lack innocence. Having labeled a thing, you no longer see that thing, you see its label instead.

When you are inhabiting a self that is fixed and set in place, you may think that you have attained something positive. As people say, "Now I know who I am." What they really know is an imitation of a real self, a collection of habits, labels, and preferences that is entirely historical.

Judgment is the constant evaluation of things as right or wrong, good or bad. When you are constantly evaluating, classifying, labeling, analyzing, you create a lot of turbulence in your internal dialogue. This turbulence constricts the flow of energy between you and the field of pure potentiality. You literally squeeze the "gap" between thoughts.

If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

Thank you, Obvious Warning Labels. Without you I might have stuck my kid in a washing machine, lit a match near an open gas line, used my hair dryer while sleeping, or, God forbid, not realized eggs may contain—wait for it—eggs. I have no idea how I ever function without you. (I almost ingested the contents of a lava lamp just yesterday, but your label made another quick save. God bless.)

Labels like "bipolar" say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.

Growing fourteen inches in a summer is easy. It's growing out of a label that's hard.

Finch scribbles something and slaps it to the wall. Welcome. He scribbles something else. Freak. He shows it to me before destroying it. He writes Belong, which goes on the wall, and Label, which doesn't. Warmth, Saturday, Wander, You, Best friend go up, while Cold, Sunday, Stand still, Everyone else go into the heap.

I grew out of my clothes because, it turns out, growing fourteen inches in a summer is easy. It's growing out of a label that's hard.