Quotes About Identity

Almost all cigarette smokers, for instance, have a favorite brand and insist that they cannot be satisfied by any other brand. When blindfolded, however, they cannot distinguish this favorite brand from any other brand. They are not buying the cigarettes but buying the package. The same is true of most beer drinkers: they have a favorite brand, but cannot distinguish it from other brands when blindfolded.

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

1. People who meet Mr. A when he has the Oral Submissive self predominant, will remember him as that sort of person. People who meet him when he has the Semantic/rational self predominant remember him as another sort of person. Etc.

2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you forget the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self. E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think I am always a weakling, quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.

Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.

As we said at the beginning, the bedrock claim of existentialism holds that existence precedes essence, or we have no essence. Like electrons, we jump from one information system to another, and only those who have not looked closely believe that one essence remains constant through all transformations.

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

Conclusion: who you are, and what you think you are, is a creation edited and orchestrated by your brain.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

It only takes a few weeks in prison to become "a convict," whatever your definition of yourself was before, it only takes a few weeks in the Army to become a "soldier.

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know.

So let's consider other factors or qualities that ought to—but generally don't—count for much in making a male a "real" man, factors that many men keep in the shadows: vulnerability, empathy, emotional transparency and literacy, the capacity for relational intimacy—all qualities more commonly associated with being female than male.

What if you could be young again and were able to undo the things that were done that made you into the person you would later become. But then who would you be.

Businessmen learn the way businessmen are supposed to be. Professors learn the way professors are supposed to be. Construction workers learn how construction workers are supposed to be. They spend their lives trying to be what they're supposed to be and being scared they aren't. Quiet desperation.

I'm entirely fascinated with you," I said. "And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.

it's better to be what I am than to be failing at what I am not.

The point is not to get hung up on being what you're supposed to be. If you can, it's good to do what pleases you.

Keep her origins a mystery.

I took some time to evaluate them, and concluded that fashionable dress was heavily dependent on who was wearing it. I

I explained to the desk sergeant who I was, and he got so excited at one point that he glanced up at me for a moment before he went back to writing in a spiral notebook.

Back down to the ghetto again," I said. "Good for you," Hawk said. "Give you a chance to be a minority." "I like you," I said. "I am a minority.

One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant.

Do you have a first name, Mr. Spenser'?" Jill said. She had a soft girlish voice with just a hint of huskiness at the edges. I told her my first name.