Quotes About Inclusion

In junior high, I really wanted to be popular. Suddenly there were parties with boys, and I wanted to be part of that. There was a group of girls, and I wanted to be friends with them.

Homosexuality is like an inside baseball thing. It's like a gag that people share; 'How is your husband?' But when it comes to bringing diversity to a broader audience, suddenly it's a different road. It's what we call 'a risk.' Isn't it our responsibility to elevate the standards and change people's perceptions?

Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

You know, the sad thing of post-9/11, which was of course horrific, was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades, suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'

No one can feel as the owner of the country and no one can feel excluded from the right of property. We must all suffer Colombia.

No individual, regardless of where they live or whom they love, should suffer discrimination.

The sad truth is that millions of people with mental illness suffer stigma and prejudice, especially at work.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

We need our children in Jamaica - especially those suffering with dyslexia, autism, cerebral palsy - to get more attention.

In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively.

Having a monolithic view of feminism is suffocating.

I would certainly never suggest that any lesbian should be ashamed of her sexual preference.

If I'm in the position where I get to hire someone, where I get to decide who joins me on tour, then I am mindful about that, and I try to suggest women that I know who I think deserve more exposure.

It feels dismissive to suggest relationships can ever be truly colourblind. And more importantly, I don't believe they ever should be. To not see colour or race would be to ignore racism rather than combating it.

I'm not suggesting that we promote a homosexual lifestyle and we impose it on people, but I am suggesting that it is important to be reflective of our culture and to not kibosh people from the mainstream.

The sentiment of those suggesting the Olympics and Paralympics be combined is no doubt well intentioned. But it also echoes the myth that disabled people want to be other than what we are - that we'd like nothing more than to be 'allowed in' with the able-bodied competitors.

Perhaps the fact that it has taken so long for someone like myself to come through indicates that some of the problems that people are suggesting aren't what they might seem.

Overly simplistic suggestions that we ban people from entering this country, based on religion, or ban people from an entire region of the world is counterproductive. It will not work. We need to build bridges to communities, to American-Muslim communities right now, to encourage them to help us in our homeland security efforts.

It would be simply suicidal to French Canadians to form a party by themselves.

More black women are in the professional-managerial field, and they don't want to look like the guys sitting next to them in pinstriped suits.

In classrooms full of students who range from brilliant to sullen disaffection, it's games - and often games alone - that I've seen engage every single person in the room. For some, the right kind of play can spell the difference between becoming part of something, and the lifelong feeling that they're not meant to take part.

The snappy way I would sum it up is not everyone is queer, but everyone has felt different. And I think that is something that people can really relate to in our music.

After a show over the summer, a girl came up to me who was a pastor at her church, which was not accepting of same-sex relationships. She said that 'Same Love' allowed her to come out regardless of the consequences.

What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It's the summit of something else. It's distilled Englishness.