Quotes About Identity

The truth is that all of us have multiple identities -- if only because all of us were children once, then teenagers, and are these things no longer, yet are them still.

maybe everybody is really somebody else deep down but they all learn their lines and get their diplomas and go through life playing these roles and they get so used to it they just can't stop.

Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." We

Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The

To modern conservatives, women are first and foremost breeders.

But today's trailer trash are merely yesterday's vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

What's more, the North's unflattering genealogy began in the "bogs and fens" of Ireland and England, where they were spawned from vagabond stock and swamp people.

People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget.

Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families.

What can be more false and heartless," Adams logged in his diary, "than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." We are a country that imagines

A North Carolina journalist neatly summed up the identity confusion: "If you think you're a redneck, you think you're hardworking, fun-loving, and independent. If you don't think you're a redneck, you think they're loud, obnoxious, bigoted, and shallow.

The words "waste" and "trash" are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony

Houston was actually a strange choice to carry this banner of racial pride. Between 1829 and 1833, before he became president, he lived with the Cherokees, took two Indian wives, and sat for a portrait in full Indian garb.

My personality. Perhaps the greatest mystery is that one: How can you know what your personality is, since it is completely dependent on how it is perceived and by whom? There's a mirror for beauty, but not for personality.

It was never about winning medals or being famous.

On good days I felt like a chrysalis from which a butterfly had emerged, and on bad days I felt like a chewing-gum wrapper someone had thrown in the hedges.

What we believe about ourselves determines how we live. If we believe and act on lies, we will end up in bondage

Because God created male and female, we women are innately feminine. Granted, a woman can accentuate her femininity or she can detract from it, but she cannot change it—our sex chromosomes are in every cell of our bodies. Our femininity is a gift of grace from a loving God.