Quotes About Diversity

vÅ¡echny systémy', dokonce i takzvané 'neohrani?ené demokracie' vylu?ovaly z ob?anství ne ménÄ› než ?tvrtinu své populace v d?sledku vÄ›ku, narození, danÄ› z hlavy, kriminálního rejstÃ…â"¢íku nebo dalÅ¡ího.

But don't worry; almost no one in this ship speaks System English and she isn't one of the few. They talk their 'secret language' -- only it isn't secret; it's just Finnish.

Decentralization, dear

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." ? Robert A. Heinlein, writing as Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color—by making point of how they don't care.

Aussies and Enzees and black fellows and marys and Malays and Tamil and name it.

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

The absolutist One True Faith came out of the Dark Ages and should get sent back there. We live with varying perspectives, especially if we have to deal with people of varying cultures.

Being modeltheists, the Fundamentalists of course reject any model but their own Eternally True Model; but why are they always especially sarcastic and suspicious when Oriental or African sources are quoted? Bronowski, we noted, said frankly that the Japanese are incapable of seeing the world objectively — i.e. the way he saw it — but how many Fundamentalists think that, too, but are too politic to say it openly?

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.

It begins to seem that no one reality-tunnel is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

Around the world today are millions living in the Marxist reality-tunnel, the vegetarian reality-tunnel, the Buddhist reality-tunnel, the nudist reality-tunnel, the monetarist reality-tunnel, the Methodist reality-tunnel, the Zionist reality-tunnel, the Polynesian totemistic reality-tunnel etc.

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems. Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left . . .

Back down to the ghetto again," I said. "Good for you," Hawk said. "Give you a chance to be a minority." "I like you," I said. "I am a minority.

It's as natural as anyone else.

One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant.

Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.