Quotes About Diversity

neither gay nor straight, just odd

Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of these experiences can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.

If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups," he said. "I couldn't have relationships that were conditional on excluding my brother—or anyone else. We are all in one fight, and our freedom is all the same freedom.

Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity.

Love, no matter what.

Labeling a child's mind as diseased—whether with autism, intellectual disabilities, or transgenderism—may reflect the discomfort that mind gives parents more than any discomfort it causes their child. Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser.

when describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'.

You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get a little worn out by being that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

The LP actress Linda Hunt once wrote, 'Dwarfism, after all, isn't like cancer or heart disease. It isn't fatal, and it isn't even an illness. It is physical, though, and inescapable. You don't get over it. It is you. But you aren't it, and that's an important distinction.

Andrew Solomon

there is no universal standard of well-being.

Unusual bodies have been described throughout history as reflections of sin, as omens from the gods, as the basis for laughter or charity or punishment.

Some kinds of grace would not have entered the world if everyone's hips and legs worked the same way. Deformity has been brought into beauty's fold, a catalyst for justice rather than an affront to it.

People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five…

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get tired of embodying that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay, but the idea of no one being gay makes me miss myself already.

So the question is whether people prefer to be marginal in a mainstream world, or mainstream in a marginal world, and many people quite understandably prefer the latter.

Ability is a tyranny of the majority. If most people could flap their arms and fly, the inability to do so would be a disability.

We are all differently abled from one another, and context—which is socially constructed—often decides what will be protected and indulged.

Aunque muchos de nosotros nos sentimos orgullosos de lo diferentes que somos de nuestros padres, nos entristece lo diferentes que nuestros hijos son de nosotros.

If everyone isn't beautiful, then no one is.