Quotes About Identity

When the proximate community is dysfunctional, alienated individuals need some other way to channel their need to belong.4 Populist nationalism offers one such appealing vision of a larger purposeful imagined community—whether it is white majoritarianism in Europe and the United States, the Islamic Turkish nationalism of Turkey's Justice and Development Party, or the Hindu nationalism of India's Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

My name is Raghuram Rajan and I do what I do.

But the more I focused on my interests, the more it brought out things I liked about myself

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

Fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

You meet people in Hollywood that are famous, and you're not sure what they got famous for.

I'm about as big a star as the Baha'i faith has got, which is pretty pathetic.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.

Arabia, like Ireland, is mostly a country in a movie.

stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province's west, Sikhs in the centre, and Hindu Jats in the east

Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India.

am I inferior simply because I am not English born? Am I to be a slave because I am an Indian?

Many of today's youngsters are unaware that in their grandparents' time Kolkata, Dhaka and Chittagong were part of a single entity, and Lahore, Rawalpindi, Amritsar and Jalandhar likewise. And they are unaware of what it means for a nation to find freedom.

Recruit new soldiers for the Empire's armies from rural Punjab but underscore every recruit's distinct religion and caste

Thus the Gurus were all from the 'high' Khatri caste of traders and administrators but within that caste from middle-level clans or sub-castes.

Caste taboos had been broken, and a measure of equality introduced. But they had also become a distinct community, which for writing used a new script called

About ten to twelve million people were forced to leave their homes and cross the new border.102

Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims mainly, but also Dogras and Gurkhas, had enlisted on the Empire's behalf.)

Thus Punjabi became the 'Sikh' language, Urdu the 'Muslim' language, and Hindi the 'Hindu' language. Language was uprooted from ground-level and tied to religion rather than to the varied people who spoke it, or the tract where it was spoken.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.

I am an invisible man…. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.