Quotes About Identity

The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.

Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.

However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is 'my true self'. Humans aren't individuals. They are 'dividuals'.

Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now has at least three such enemies - nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

Unlike the creators of The Matrix and The Truman Show, Huxley doubted the possibility of escape, because he questioned whether there was anybody to make the escape. Since your brain and your "self" are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

Most people who go on identity quests are like children going treasure hunting. They find only what their parents have hidden for them in advance

don't confuse uniqueness with superiority.

How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

Today most of us speak, think and dream in imperial languages that were forced upon our ancestors by the sword.

all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.

the twenty-first century religions don't bring rain, they don't cure illnesses, they don't build bombs—but they do get to determine who are "us" and who are "them," whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.

Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages.

Inside Out brutally dismantles this myth. It adopts the latest neurobiological view of humans and takes viewers on a journey into Riley's brain only to discover that she has no authentic self and that she never makes any free choices.

Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our territory, and we don't care an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human.

The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism.

being born into an African American family in an African American neighborhood meant that he was surrounded by people like him who taught him what he needed to know in order to survive and flourish

In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato sauce; in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chillies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss café is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these foods is native to those nations.

Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of "culturists.

Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor.

By waving a colorful flag and singing an anthem you transform the nation from an abstract story into a tangible reality.

We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science—but we are still stuck with only national politics.

the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.