Quotes About Diversity

It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex—trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it.

Don't impose your personal working style onto an organization that behaves in a different manner

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

They didn't agree on everything. They didn't share all the same opinions. In fact, there was enormous scope for disagreement, argument, even quarrels. But where it mattered - where the wellsprings of their personalities rose and gave meaning to their lives - they were the same.

A people or a faith divided against itself became the sum of its weaknesses, not its strengths, and anyone who didn't know that was doomed.

We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.

The Cayce Readings spoke of God as a universal loving intelligence that does not discriminate against anyone—nor should we: "More wars, more bloodshed have been shed over the racial and religious differences than over any other problem. These, too, must go the way of all others; and man must learn . . . whether they be called of this or that sect or schism or ism or cult, the Lord is ONE."20

Here they were, a group as diverse as one could possibly bring together. Jew, Samaritan, Roman, Greek – all united because of one who had come from God and returned to God only a few short years ago. Surely here was living proof that the eternal truths brought to life during Jesus' time on earth meant transformation was not only possible, it was real.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

We cherish individual liberty and diversity, but we also see the value in common pursuits.

Y'all take care of yourself now... strange and interesting friends are hard to find.

Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be. People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks. Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

Why can't I be a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim?

Indeed, from my earliest years the idea of transformation has been central to my life. Naturally so, I suppose, being the child of diplomats. I changed schools, languages, countries and continents a number of times during my childhood. At each change I had the opportunity to re-create myself, to present a new façade, to bury past errors and misrepresentations.

Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It

English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, its shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar—the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Lo similar se atrae, los opuestos se repelen.

There may be a lot of kids in the world, but the stupid ones are all stupid in the same way.

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?

There are so many different ways to be poor

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.