Quotes About Diversity

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.

But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?

To each his own magic.

In our travels, we have come across many equations--math for understanding the universe, for making music, for mapping stars, and also for tipping, which is important. Here is our favorite equation: Us plus Them equals All of Us. It is very simple math. Try it sometime. You probably won't even need a pencil.

I can be whatever. You can be whatever. We can be whatever. Whatever, together.

I'd say... Petra crossed her legs, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. I'd say, I am too fucking fabulous for one gender. Oh, and can we please get rid of the cheesy dance numbers? It's like torture step-ball-change. I'd say I am not a race. I am an individual, Nicole said. Sosie moved her fingers gracefully, but no one understood. She waited for a moment. I would say, learn to hear me in my own voice. I'm hearing impaired, not invisible.

There are no wrong decisions ? only different ones.

You know what else is hot? said a nameless blonde as she put her arm around the one black girl. What? Bisexuals. Totally. Well, not like real bisexuals who are just sort of your everyday people, but, like, the kind of bisexuals you see in magazines wearing nothing but body paint and kissing both boys and girls to promote a new single. Totally, totally hot.

But isn't that strange and wonderful unpredictability part of humanity? Aren't all of our differences what already make us a great nation?

The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance.

It was always somebody's turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.

Discord need not be an impediment. Differences can bring strength.

There are no girl books. There are no boy books. There are just books.

That's totally their interpreter, a girl with a lip ring informs us. Even though they totally record their music in English, they totally speak in Inuktitut. Totally.

Theta sat next to Memphis and watched Mr. and Mrs. Chan laughing about some private joke. They were a mixed couple, and they were happy. No one seemed to be bothering them. But they were also here in the few blocks of Chinatown. What happened when they crossed Canal Street into the rest of the city? What happened when they went out into the rest of the country?

Beliefs converge and become something new all the time.

Did everyone from your little Hans Christian Andersen village look the same?

if there's anything I'm starting to learn about people it's (a) that they are fundamentally suspicious and afraid of anyone who is "different," and (b) that fear makes them do and say asinine things.

I'm not really sure what I am at all anymore. We're not just sashes and states, Nicole said on a sigh. Or gender, Petra murmured. Or bodies. I'm sort of everything all at once, Nicole whispered. And then they were silent, lost to dreaming.

En Nueva York todo el mundo es de algún otro lugar.

You couldn't find a Jewish sheik?

Apple barn's better'n a pig barn," they chortled over coffee mugs in the cafés. After four years they had become accustomed to the sight of Mr. Q's oversize moustache with its melancholy droop. They no longer questioned the unorthodox W in the spelling of Qwilleran. And most of them now accepted the fact that the middle-aged divorced bachelor chose to live alone—with two cats!

To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women.

God, Jack, it makes you want to go out and convert the whole damn world to homosexuality," she told him. "Just so you can walk down the street with your head up. "Maybe