Quotes About Prejudice

To have an opinion about somebody you've never met before is pretty superficial.

If you are constantly making judgments based on superficial affiliations, your world gets to be pretty small.

Here is no thoroughly mature and clean sex world, but one that is not sufficiently human, that is only male, is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this reason there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time-bound, uneternal, that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful.

His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--

Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of

Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men Ã¢â'¬Â¦ For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.

I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with their plans.

Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie?

My God, boy! You're black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?

Ralph Ellison

Still it was nothing new, white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they'd done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.

I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing.

Was it that she understood that we resented having others think that we were all entertainers and natural singers? But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me: Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious? After all, he was singing, or trying to. What if I asked him to sing?

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less - a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force -

And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less—a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force—

I don't know if you have a soul. I only know that you are men of flesh and blood; and that blood will spill and flesh grow cold. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. and I know too how we are labeled.

Shouldn't there be some way for us to be asked to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious?

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

The negro has saved himself and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you.

The denial of Christ has less to do with facts and more to do with the bent of what a person is prejudiced to conclude.

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.