Quotes About Identity

Social psychologists confirm that we are likely to perceive people outside our own community as more alike than those within it. We perceive members of our own group as individuals, but see other groups as more or less homogenous (psychologists call this the "outgroup homogeneity bias").

To perceive others as fully human means to be saddened by the death of every single person, regardless of the population, group, or part of the world from which he comes, and regardless of our own personal acquaintance with him. If we accord him identity, then we must individualize his death [and] … if we accord him community, then we must experience his death as a personal loss.

For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book.

It should be clear by now that we tend to think about races along the same lines as we think about species. Both races and species are presumed to be natural kinds defined by hidden essences passed down the "bloodline" from parents to their offspring. Both are scientifically vacuous but intuitively compelling.

wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.

We're a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self

When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person?

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.

Falling in love is thus the most conformist method of being an individual. Conversely, falling in love is the most original and spontaneous way to conform, perhaps the only way of conforming to social demands that will never make you look like a conformist. It is the one way that you can behave like everyone else and still claim, at the same time, that you did it your way.

Strange, isn't it, how one can always learn to love oneself, however ghastly one is?

It occurs to him that there are two kinds of people in the world --- those who long to hear God say their name, and those who dread it.

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb.

I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.

It's upsetting to be a man in our society.

Whatever God's Word says I am - that's what I am! Whatever His Word says I can do - with His help I can do! Whatever His Word says He will do - He will do!

You don't have a god in you, you are one.

God sees us as we are, loves us as we are, and accepts us as we are. But by His grace, He does not leave us as we are.

Someone's opinion of you isn't reality... unless you decide to allow it!! You are who God says you are!!!

Accept the fact that you're never gonna be someone else and embrace the fact that the world needs you as God made you to be.

Stop determining your worth and value by what other people say. Be determined by what the Word of God (scriptures)says.

God makes originals not carbon copies. It's okay to be inspired by someone, but be bold enough to be yourself.

Black Consciousness therefore takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God's plan in creating Black people black.

There's no, 'Oh my God, somebody else is gonna come back and take my spot.' I wanna have a spot that's my spot, that nobody can take away, because nobody else is me.