Quotes About Identity

You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.

They treat Haitians like dogs in the Bahamas, a woman says. To them, we are not human. Even though their music sounds like ours. Their people look like ours. Even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach… San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

the major relational problem for our species is not getting together; protoplasm loves to join. The problem is preserving self in a close relationship. No human on planet Earth does that well.

those who lack self-definition, whether they are children, marriage partners, employees, clients, therapists, or supervisors, will always perceive those who are well-defined to be "headstrong.

only as long as we can laugh at ourselves are we nobody else

I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

Maybe taking ourselves for somebody else means that we cannot bear to see ourselves as we are.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

We [Jews] have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity

Lo más importante fue para mí el reconocimiento, confirmado por todos mis experimentos con LSD, que lo que de común se denomina «realidad», incluida la realidad de la propia persona, de ningún modo es algo fijo, sino algo de múltiple significación, y que no existe una realidad, sino varias; cada una de ellas encierra una distinta conciencia del yo.

The good news is that we are Buddha. The bad news is that all beings are Buddha. The sickness of being human is the sickness of wanting to be unique.

I was sort of a half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one.

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.