Quotes About Identity

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him.

The greater number of men are merely corporals.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

Even dress is apt to inflame a man's opinion of himself.

Every man, however little, makes a figure in his own eyes.

Each man has his own way of being himself and of saying it so ultimately that he can't be denied.

A man who thinks too much about his ancestors is like a potato-the best part of him is underground.

Where all of the man is what property he owns, it does not take long to annihilate him.

Man is that name of power which rises above them all, and gives to every one the right to be that which God meant he should be.

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

The entire merit of a man can never be made known; nor the sum of his demerits, if he have them. We are only known by our names; as letters sealed up, we but read each other's superscriptions.

Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'

A man can be honest in any sort of skin.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.

You can't make Howard Dean a straw man. He is what he appears to be. And that's the beauty of Howard Dean.

There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

Since all men are created equal, I have to thank God I was born a woman.

being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

We are not men, but promises of men.