Quotes About Diversity

Everyone is crazy here, Savannah. You are going to fit right in.

Almost everybody I met had a Christine Jorgensen joke.

It is interesting to note that the response to me in Swedish press held no ridicule or personal animosity. The Swedes indicated their affection and acceptance of me on the basis that I was a human being first and, second, a scientific marvel instead of an oddity. It was probably the first time that the press had not taken it upon itself to decide what I was--a circumstance that had prevailed from the time the first story broke.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.

Everybody is Other in Maupin.

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

Didn't he know that heterosexuals needed to breed so homosexuals could even exist?

He looked as incongruous as a rose in a bowl of brussels sprouts.

I think it's funny that people all look so different on the outside, but inside out hears, our brains all look the same. I can't help thinking it should be the other way round, as it's the thoughts inside our heads that make us unique.

Gathered together in this fashion, Jerry could see that the Whitstables possessed certain common physical characteristics, including wayward teeth, large earlobes, and the sort of stress-related blotchiness usually found in cornered jellyfish.

I can't bear those people who only talk about arthritis and ring roads and television and mending gutters, although one does recognize the need for them, if only because they occasionally provide babies who grow up to be more interesting.

It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.

I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition - which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing.

The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you

It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.

You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head. I once even observed the etiquette of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me.

I am always and at once on the defensive, for example, when people speak of races and nations as if they were personalities and had souls and destinies and such like.

The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society. If

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.)