Quotes About Diversity

I'm an utterly average, total geek.

This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.

Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial source of his strength and originality. Because of his colour and origin, he saw the country differently - not as a native, but as an outsider.

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

Stoke-on-Trent is totally and utterly different to South London.

Kunta Kinte is NOT an American, and he utterly rejects that idea at every turn.

During my years in the United States, I met a lot of evangelicals; they comprise a quarter of the American population, and are utterly unlike most Christians you'll encounter in this country.

On Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., there are statues of five Confederate luminaries and then, incongruously in this company, one of Arthur Ashe.

When I'm asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one.

I believe that if everybody spent their next vacation in a community in America with people they didn't agree with, they'd probably leave feeling a little more comfortable about the country they live in.

I was in Italy on vacation, and I saw my reflection in a mirror. I saw how unique my skin was and why people stop me on the street to ask about it. I started falling in love with it.

New York is like a vacation - no beach required.

The Dominican is a real nice place to go for vacation. It is a poor country, but it has another side. Beautiful beaches. It's like every country. You're going to have a lot of poor people, but there's a beautiful side, too.

It's something that's almost taken for granted in sitcoms about white families. Like, 'Oh, we're going on a summer vacation!' As if that's something that everybody does.

I love that drag is a way for people to vacation in the gay nightlife, but... it's quite a different experience to perform for a gay audience than a straight audience.

There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I'm one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

My parents speak with an accent. A lot of people that I know speak with an accent. I have friends who speak with an accent. Accents in a vacuum aren't a problem; it's how you portray those characters and how well they're served in a script.

My love of South Africa is not gray; it's not vague. It's very specific. It's in keeping with our Constitution - 'Unity in diversity.'

I think the only universal thing is one individual. If you talk about a country or a nation or a culture, it's so vague. I mean what is a nation? A nation is full of nice and bad and long and tall and short and thin people. It's not like everybody is the same.

I was born in Africa but brought up in the north-east of England. Most of my childhood was spent living on a council estate that overlooked the Tyne and I went to the same junior school as Paul Gascoigne, of whom I have a vague memory.

When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.

I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.