Quotes About Prejudice

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

Se você está julgando se alguém é bom violinista, saber se essa pessoa é alta ou baixa, bonita ou feia, branca ou negra não vai ajudar. Na verdade, provavelmente apenas adicionará preconceitos que dificultarão ainda mais sua tarefa.

this wasn't about something really obvious, such as skin color or age or height or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist.

But Tim Levine's research suggests that they aren't random—that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency.

we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside.

If we were more thoughtful as a society, if we were willing to engage in some soul searching about how we approach and make sense of strangers Sandra Bland would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.

When we confront a stranger, we need to substitute an idea, a stereotype, for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.

what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up.

I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry. . . Business-like, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery...

You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.

America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all together, irrespective of their color.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! [...] I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

Why is that when people become ill and have something wrong with any of their organs, they get sympathy from other people - except when that organ is their brain?

The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.

While he was alive Peter Jennings did considerable damage to the cause of civilization and human deceny [sic] by his sympathy for Jew-hating terrorists and their supporters.

There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.

A Brahmin is not so much in need of education as a Chandala. If the son of a Brahmin needs one teacher, that of a Chandala needs ten.

A teacher sent the following note home with a six-year-old boy 'He is too stupid to learn.' That boy was Thomas A. Edison.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

in Bengal it was so easy to know who was who; more often than not, just to hear someone's name would reveal their religion, their caste, their village.

There are few expressions in the English language that are less attractive to women than 'Rare Book Dealer.

When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, Jews go home to Palestine. Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, Jews get out of Palestine.