Quotes About Diversity

Jack Warner "didn't want any niggers on his lot." At another studio where he was being considered for a publicity position, he learned that the all-Negro cast of Cabin in the Sky was excluded from the whites-only commissary.

Deberiamos respetar a los muertos y honrar lo diferentes que eran de nosotros en lugar de hacerlo para celebrar su capacidad de precedernos o la nuestra para superarlos

All things being equal (fortunately things are seldom equal, not exactly), people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs. An amplification of this evidently inborn predisposition leads with frightening ease to racism and religious bigotry. Then, also with frightening ease, good people do bad things. I know this truth from experience, having grown up in the Deep South during the 1930s

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself. (254)

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before 10 or 20 thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

A typical battlefield of this struggle is Hawaii, America's most deceptively beautiful state. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity. When

For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence. For their founders and leaders the enigma has been relatively easy to solve. The gods put us on Earth, then they told us how to behave. Why should people around the world continue to believe one fantasy over another out of the more than four thousand that exist on Earth? The answer is tribalism

For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or other entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. (Example: a kind of mollusk, Aplysia, proved ideal for exploring the cellular base of memory.) Conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which it is ideally suited. (Example: bats were logical for the discovery of sonar.)

People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They

Much of culture, including especially the content of the creative arts, has arisen from the inevitable clash of individual selection and group selection.

Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners. For, while the various segments of the Earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire Earth, and a single home, the world.

these species have evolved only rarely in evolution.

So how would you define a Londoner, then?" Lady Penny asked curiously. "Someone who lives here. It's like the old definition of a cockney: someone who's born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner," he added with a grin, "is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.

A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services.

English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.

Our dependence on culture means that our minds need to be open to others, so that we can learn from them.

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?

When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.

If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power. Just consider what you have to do to guess right.

Men and women have strengths that complement each other.

It was weird to me to go to school all week and experience racial diversity, but then on Sunday be faced with the option of having to choose between black and white. This didn't seem right to me. The whole world outside of the church seemed to be in full color, but the church looked like the black and white television of the old days.