Quotes About Labels

For decades, I have cringed whenever someone called me 'illegal,' as if I'm an insect on someone's back. I found out I didn't have the right papers - that I was here illegally - when I tried to get a driver's permit at age 16. But I am not 'illegal.' No person is.

Whenever you discuss politics, it is always better to use individual names rather then the term neocon.

When you label somebody and put them in a box, then you put the lid on the box, and you just never look inside again. I think it's much more interesting for human beings to look at each other's stories and see each other. Really see each other and then see themselves through other people's stories. That's where you start to break down stereotypes.

I think that it is mad that everything always has to have a label - whether it be the clothes by designers, or whether you are in a relationship or not. Everybody always wants to have that label when it is not always necessary.

I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

While Obama, the olive-branch poseur, has called for a restoration of 'civility' in Washington and liberal elites whine and whinny about the need for 'no labels,' class-warfare demagoguery has metastasized unchecked.

You always hear 'black Republican,' but you never hear 'white Democrat.' We've got to get beyond the labels and stereotypes. Other people have hang-ups about it. I don't.

I got the name in primary school because my hair was shaggy. And I didn't like it; I thought it was derogatory.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Given how dangerous it is for someone to consume something they are allergic to, you would think that companies would just make sure they print labels which have the allergy information on.

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.

We are on the forefront of a revolution in which identity and expression will take priority over the labels assigned to us at birth; in which self-identification will take priority over perception; in which gender will fall away entirely.

I think you've got to keep it simple, keep it fresh. Stay away from all that processed stuff, read the labels.

I now believe that major labels can only work with people who care more about fame and money than the quality of the art they produce.

For 'Kabir Singh,' an entirely original album had to be done and that's how music should be made, but unfortunately that does not happen as the labels and the producers are more interested in fast food music.

My problem with the word 'clean' is that it has become too complicated. It has become too loaded. When I first read the term, it meant natural, unprocessed. Now it doesn't mean that at all. It means diet. It means fad.

While the word 'bisexual' was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.

I'm the renegade of funk. I've made house, techno, rock, funk, reggae... That's why I've been on so many different labels.

Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

It's so tedious that everyone must be defined.

What's with the whole 'child actor' and 'teen actor' thing? You're either an actor or actress, or you're not. I don't get it! I want to be taken seriously as an actor.

I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.

I completely understand why labels would be a little bit hesitant to sign somebody coming off of a television show, in their first glance.

When I am in Mumbai, I am called a director. In Chennai, I am called a hero. In the Telugu States, I am called a dance master.