Quotes About Prejudice

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof.

It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'.¹ But secondly—and this is much more important—I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb "Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian

All nationalistic distinctions -- all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect -- are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

Vi?š bija aizmirsis, ka vairums ?aužu sveš? zem? j?tas labi tikai tad, ja var noniecin?t t?s iedz?vot?jus.

the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like  this,  people  ignorant  of  one  another's  existence,  held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think

At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning

It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.

It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist.

Middle-class people are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pithead baths exist practically all the men use them.

Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.

Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies

And remember I told you about the bad people in the old days, who used to burn witches, and how scary that must've been for the witches, who were really just frightened old ladies who'd made the mistake of being too intelligent for the era they were living in

Has he been to America? He makes a kind of scoffing sound, as in: Right, pal, I'm going to America. America does not like Arabs, he says. They think we are... I will not even say the word. Terrorists, I say. He shuts his eyes in offended agreement.

Writing about Gregor von Rezzori's classic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the "passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky." She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: "carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness.

Our country must abandon all the habits of racism because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.

My first challenge was explaining Andover to my friends in Texas. In those days, most Texans who went away to high school had discipline problems. When I told a friend that I was headed to a boarding school in Massachusetts, he had only one question: "Bush, what did you do wrong?