Quotes About Belonging

People always ask me why I didn't join a crew or something like that. I don't know if that would have changed my legacy or if I would still be here today.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

Let's be clear: no one is forced into hazing. If you don't want to be hazed, don't join a fraternity.

These kids are looking for direction, for identification. Kids join gangs because they need a father figure or they want to be part of a group.

I never remember, like, saying, 'Well, I'm going to belong - join the civil rights movement.'

I tried to join three gangs, and every single one gave me a different excuse, but it was pretty much along the lines of, 'You're too goofy. You're too cute. You don't fit in.'

1983 - Country music had made a resurgence in this country so I joined a country band. I was the only black guy in the band and consequently, usually the only black guy in many of the places where we played.

But as soon as I joined 'Six Feet Under', I felt like I was finally doing something again that the fans really loved, and I could stop being afraid of 'Clueless' fans!

When I first joined the army, I felt I had to be part of the alpha male culture. But I didn't.

I'm the guy who needs to be front and center. I joined a fraternity to do that.

I am not too interested in leaving the street people and joining the Establishment. I prefer street folks.

Joining the Islander family and living on the Island has been special.

I will admit when I was 16, 17 years old, the thought of playing for the Jays was at the top. There's something about joining a club and being embraced by a club and then building a relationship and commitment to a team.

I can't stand it when restaurants don't have a sense of place in a city. When I'm in London, I want to know I'm in London. When you're sitting in my joint, you know you're sitting in Seattle.

I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'

My way of fitting in was through jokes and making people laugh.

Our fans often tell us that they see themselves in us. The relationship between the guys in Broken Lizard rings a bell with them, because they have their own little friend groups, with their own complex dynamics, and their own private jokes.

I was joking the other day that I'm American UKIP.

People often say, 'I like your comics, even though I don't know enough math to get all of them,' as if it's some kind of club where they don't belong. But there's no club. There's just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.

The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.

diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasize our narrow ethnic or racial identities instead.

While the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity around diversity as such. Identity has to be related to substantive ideas such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect these ideas; the country is justified in excluding from citizenship those who reject them.

Successful state building is dependent, therefore, on the prior existence of a sense of national identity that serves as a locus of loyalty to the state itself, rather than to the social groups underlying it.

National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict.