Quotes About Prejudice

Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.

Es gibt ja keine verrücktere Idee, behauptete Tweedie weiter, als zu glauben, es gebe zwei Kategorien von Frauen: anständige und unanständige.

I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated "all my homosexual patients are quite sick" - to which I finally replied "so are all my heterosexual patients."

I've found that if you wear a beret, people think you're either a cabdriver or a producer of dirty movies.

In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. ... But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.

Women ain't good for nothing but to marry and work for men

the issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

And I always feel this with straight people—that whenever they're being nice to me, pleasant to me, all the time really, underneath they're only assessing me as a criminal and nothing else. It's too late for me to be any different now to what I am, but I still feel this keenly, that that's their only approach, and they're quite incapable of accepting me as anything else.27

and all criminal defendants—are entitled to have their attorney present at lineups that occur after there has been an indictment. The Court forcefully stated that there "is grave potential for prejudice, intentional or not, in the pretrial lineup, which may not be capable of reconstruction at trial.

legislation was passed to afford a federal right in federal courts because, by reason of prejudice, passion, neglect, intolerance, or otherwise," states were likely to violate constitutional rights, and hence a federal forum was needed to enforce the Constitution.4

Rampart officers came to assume that all Latino and African American men between fifteen and fifty who had short hair and wore baggy pants were gang members, and that that warranted any efforts on their part to remove them from the streets. So they planted evidence to frame innocent people and lied in courts to gain convictions.

The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant.

This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.

kidnappers generally roamed the coast, and in the rainy, grey dusk they would stun a freed man in the street and drag him half-conscious onto a ship bound for the Southern states, to make of him a slave again. This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates.

Ehud was tall and strong and was always quiet. Lots of people thought that Ehud was quiet because he was stupid. That wasn't true. He may not have been the smartest kid on the block, but he was no moron either.

Most of the human race, by one means or other, are prepossessed with principles opposed to the religion of reason.

The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.

Se anche non rimanesse che un solo tedesco decente, quest'unico tedesco meriterebbe di essere difeso contro quella banda di barbari, e grazie a lui non si avrebbe il diritto di riversare il proprio odio su un popolo intero. […] L'odio indiscriminato è una malattia dell'anima, odiare non è nel mio carattere.

And I didn't neglect to point out to my Yankee buddies that most of the high shooters in our platoon were Southern boys.

The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.

I realized this is what white people do to each other—they cultivate each other's fear. It's very violent.

When the last nationwide smallpox epidemic began in 1898, some people believed that whites were not susceptible to the disease. It was called "Nigger itch," or, where it was associated with immigrants, "Italian itch" or "Mexican bump." When