Quotes About Diversity

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.

remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village

Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal.

The above forms of human blindness [racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia] stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals.

Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must to is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

To imply, however, that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy.

Now I can add prostitute to my list of life's accomplishments.

All of us are richer and more fascinating and more complex than we can ever know.

I am tired from having lived seventeen different lives, compressed into the space of one.

Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn't make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn't make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl's hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.

The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.

Not all gay men send me penis pictures. But no straight men do. And to date, no woman has sent me a picture of her vaginal canal. 'I know it's a little stretched out, but I've had four kids. What do you expect? LOL.

Think of the actual physical elements that compose our bodies: we are 98 percent hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. That's table sugar. You are made of the same stuff as table sugar. Just a couple of tiny differences here and there and look what happened to the sugar: it can stand upright and send tweets.

Not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California Redwoods - true, but right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.

It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.

In spite of the open, laughing face that the Burmese presented to the world, the ingrained, if inarticulate, conviction of their own nationhood prevented them from truly admitting those they saw as 'foreign' into their inner sancturns.

If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to

She knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial.

The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.

She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was "unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.