Quotes About Identity

For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky.

Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple, colonial, philistine society.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people's lands.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say "Sum!" because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Mam-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.

The past of a place survives in its poor.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, "Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.

So here is the greatest irony of all: that the self that almost by definition is entirely private is to significant extent a social construct.

Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an "other" among others.

God—I don't know why—wanted me to be a Czech. It was not my choice. But I accept it, and I try to do something for my country because I live here.

Et sie minnuu tunne? Mie olen Rokan Antti. Pienmaanviljelijä Kannakselt. Nykyään Tikkakosken mannekiini.

Mää olen ahven. Mää olen hiilest tehty ahven… Mää ihmettelen kauhiast.

Rokkahaa mie. Antero on etunim. Antiksihaa minnuu on sanottu koko ikän, ja niin mie sanon itekkii.

Sitten hän kysyi Vanhalalta virallisen tärkeällä äänellä: – Korpraali Vanhala. Oletteko te lammas vai suomalainen sotamies? – Minä olen mailman paras metsätaistelija, hihi… – Niinpä niin. Honkajoki huokasi muka surkean alistuvasti. – Yksi toivo minulla vielä on. Kunpa sota loppuisi ja pääsisi isoon taloon sonniksi.

Let us keep ever in our minds the fact that it is the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that bind our vast numbers together as one people, despite caste, space and language that seemingly divide them.

You are angry Jason. You, are angry. I get that. I get it. I mean without family who the fuck are we?

I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good.

We are the first atheistic and global, all-embracing civilization. You cannot tell whether you are sitting at an airport in Hong Kong or in a hotel in Alaska. Everything is instrumentalized, subjected to a short-term purpose. It is quite possible that in such a situation any sense of a deeper meaning gets lost."

The Glasgow accent was so strong you could have built a bridge with it and known it would outlast the civilization that spawned it

It's only hunting you that keeps me from being you.