Quotes About Identity

The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.

I virtually grew up at Air Force bases, and when I was younger, I'd dream of wearing a uniform like my father and grandfather. But when I turned 10, I felt theatre and acting were my calling.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

By virtue of being a half Punjabi and half Sikh, tandoori chicken was my staple diet.

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.

What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them?

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue of his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

By virtue of who we are, what we know, the promises we made to our Heavenly Father, and the fact that we are living now and where we are living, I absolutely think we were all born to lead.

Perhaps the virtue of coming from a place like Tasmania is that you had the great gift of knowing that you were not the centre of things, yet life was no less where you were.

I think I've been very fortunate, considering the obstacles that I had to deal with, you know, just being - by virtue of being a brown, lovely, brown-skinned man. But on the other hand, I've been able to make a good living, and I've been able to take care of my family, which is most important to me.

I am British. I love Britain for all its faults and all its virtues. My husband is American and I am largely based in Los Angeles, but whenever someone asks me where home is, I automatically say 'London.'

Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.

Eggs is great at leading the Boxtrolls, and that's probably my favorite trait of his. He is a Boxtroll, but he hasn't lost all of his human virtues. He can get out of his box, and he can fight back, which the Boxtrolls can't.

The word nationalism, to most people, has a virtuous whiff; historically, it's been conflated with terms like patriotism and loyalty and solidarity with one's civic tribe.

There is nothing nicer than playing someone who is cooler, tougher, more virtuous and sexier than yourself and thinking, 'I can be anyone.'

I would inevitably get the girls who were interested in me because I was the guy from E.T. It was kind of tough. I can't deny ever capitalizing upon it but on the whole in my teens I was pretty virtuous.

Myths have a certain staying power because, really, they are aspirational - not always who we are, but always who we want to be. We see ourselves as good and generous. We believe we are a virtuous nation.

When the world is telling us, 'We hate you because you're Asian, we hate you because we think you brought this virus to the world'... we need to kind of meet that with an equal and opposing force.

I'm not interested in replicating 'Hedwig' like a virus.

It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not, it's a visa, and it runs out fast.