Quotes About Identity

Most people's sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living. Most people hate their jobs. We might refer to this as "the paradox of modern work.

What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.

Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and for many people in history, it was not at all clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

all in all, you're just another jade in the wall').

indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics—can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

In short, [Native Americans] say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

If 'national character' can really be said to exist, it can only be asa. result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. if nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.

it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggeration are often catastrophic. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are.

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term 'schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another.37

That's what anarchism is for me: a community of purpose without a community of definition.

What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in 'Western civilization,' only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

Liberty grew because it served the interests of power. This apparent paradox was the core of Western identity.

Als dat klopt, als je je echt tussen haakjes voelt, laat mij dan tenminste ook binnen. De rest van de wereld mag buiten blijven, laat de wereld maar de factor buiten de haakjes zijn waarmee wij binnen vermenigvuldigd worden.

woman who claimed to want only the best for me, and yet she gave birth to me!

She had not yet sensed the pea beneath the pile of mattresses, the pea that belonged to the little brown-skinned girl who used to make up stories to keep her soul pinned down inside her or, at times, to let it fly—stories whose most exciting element was the word "suddenly" at the beginning of every sentence and before each description: Suddenly, suddenly, her heart would leap when she whispered to herself, suddenly .

È il segreto che ti sussurro all'orecchio già da un mese: noi due non siamo vivi! Voglio dire, non in un luogo in cui vigono le leggi ordinarie che regolano i rapporti tra le persone, tantomeno tra uomo e donna. Dove siamo, allora? Non m'interessa saper dove, perché dargli un nome? Sarebbero comunque nomi "loro", nomi tradotti, e con te voglio una costituzione diversa di cui saremo noi a fissare le leggi.

Of course. And you said I was one of a kind, and that if I cried 'cause of them, then you see it upside down, and it's like I'm laughing 'cause of me.

Un corpuscolo trasparente brillava in me, una scintilla, dorata, luminosa. Lo sapevo: ero io, la mia anima, la mia essenza, il senso della mia esistenza. È nata con me, pensavo, e con me morirà... e non sapevo che avrei potuto sopravviverle a lungo, divenire io stessa un'esiliata, un essere umano inaridito. E una bugiarda... che candidamente senza batter ciglio, osa dire: io.