Quotes About Diversity

Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.

Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent.

When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three, even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. (What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.)

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900; I'd like people to look at it and think, 'How the hell did he end up right over there?

He still wanted his community to be the place where he lived, a community which contained old white women, young Muslim men, Lithuanian kids, mixed-race girls, Asian parents

And what I thought was, you could probably go into any church anywhere in the world and see a middle-aged woman, no husband in sight, pushing a young lad in a wheelchair. It was one of the reasons churches were invented, probably.

My favourites are I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, Large-Hearted Boy, Aquarium Drunkard, When You Awake and Funky 16 Corners, among scores of others. (Some

names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.

And all three are different from policing in smaller cities and towns across the country.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there.

We are more than half of humanity. We are not imitation people, or chameleons taking on protective male coloration, longing for the day when men go away and we can return to being our true, insectlike selves. We are here, now. We are just like you.

Never judge a chicken by its skin.

The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

It took seven languages to make me; it would have been nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn't, so he leaned down and kissed me.

Justice? What is justice? It's a mere word. It's an abstract word with no universal meaning. To different classes of people, justice means different things.

What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts.

In a civilized society freedom to offend should be protected, but

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Black Poetry is not for Black People…it is for everybody

The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.