Best 1051 quotes in «prejudice quotes» category

The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and new means of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vast multiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, the general standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilence and famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which time and space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner, and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal of local ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests among the most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forces of the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political or social anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on the present and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of which may be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.

The nationalist regrets the change; an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.

The nation which indulges toward another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to it animosity or two its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and it's interest.

The one thing she’d been able to count on her entire life was her cleverness. She was so often right. It was humbling and disorienting to realize that she in truth knew nothing at all. One only ever saw a fraction of someone, whatever it was they chose to show you, and extrapolated a whole person from that. And saw them through a prism of one’s own prejudices.

The one prejudice it had proved hardest to root out of a society was the one towards people whose social skills were limited.

The only measure of judging a human being is through that person’s character, because character is not determined by race, religion, gender or social status. And one who recognizes this simple fact of human life behaves the same with the scientist, the janitor and the sex-worker.

The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

The point we are trying to make is that disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue. These two facts, that people do disagree and can agree, arise from the complexity of human nature. Men are rational animals. Their rationality is the source of their power to agree. Their animality, and the imperfections of their reason that it entails, is the cause of most of the disagreements that occur. Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. (P. 146)

The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

The prejudiced are easily manipulated.

The power of love is that it sees all people.

The radical implication of the expansion of higher education has been disguised by a myth which dubs all educated working class people as middle class. By definition working class people are not intelligent, so if you've got a degree you must be middle class. This nonsense is reinforced by the fact that acedemic traditions are laden with class assumptions and are presented in upper class styles even in the Polytechnics.

The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.

There are many injustices in the world, but some are worse than others. You can hate someone because he's poor, because of the clothes he wears, or for his political views. But a person can change that. If you hate someone for being a Jew or an Arab, he cannot rub off his skin. That sort of prejudice is the greatest injustice...next to taking someone's life.

There are abusive individuals whose worst little demons are greed, sloth,envy, gluttony, pride and wrath enslaved by their god which is money. They usually set their false assumptions, wrong judgments, gossips and lies forceful than the ones who hold the truth but what they missed out is that the victims of their aggressions, the targets of their wrong accusations and the recipients of their repetitive harassments carry what is truly essential and what lives longer, that is: truth and goodness, both of which shall always prevail against their vicious, evil manners.

There comes a time in everyone's life where if you have intellectual curiosity and an inquisitive mind, you assess the prejudices learned from family and the environment in which you've grown up in — and make a decision to either reject it, or take comfort in remaining ignorant.

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate.

...there is a loathing in the human heart for the vampire. It may lie dormant, but it is always there. Actually, it has nothing to do with the vampire, really. It is a loathing and fear that all humans seem to have for anything that is not exactly like them or the way they have been taught to be. If you visit one of your fine British schools you will discover even your children treat any child who is unusual or different with medieval cruelty. It does not matter if the child is different because he has been raised in a different world, or possesses some genius. If he does not fit into the pecking order of brutality and sadistic courage, he is judged an outcast. It is because human beings are such miserably insecure and frightened creatures. You may garb your world in decorum and social grace, but you are still just apes beneath your frock coats, territorial and fear-driven.

There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes.

There is data [on race and intelligence]. My claim is that it doesn't mean what we think it means. There isn't enough work; there aren't enough people who have done the work – and the definition...I mean, trust me: "heritable" is a serious problem. Because...for example, let's say that there was a belief that people who had a brow ridge, or something, were stupid. And that belief was widespread. And that brow ridge was genetically encoded, and it resulted in people going into the world and facing discrimination in school, let's say, because the brow ridge connoted to the teachers that they were not likely to be intelligent, and therefore they were given simpler lessons; they got dumbtracked or something like that. That would show up as a genetically heritable difference in intelligence between brow-ridged people and non-brow-ridged people. That does not mean that it was encoded in the genome and that it was the brain that was blueprinted...what it means is that some feature that was encoded in the genome caused the environment to interact with the individual in a way that then produced a difference in intellect. [...] It is so early in the study of this stuff, we really don't know. And the taboo nature of those questions is causing a vacuum that is being filled with an artificially pure (and probably not correct) perspective.

There is no justice in the world's censorious eyes. They will not wait to learn a man's true character; Though no wrong has been done them, one look - and they hate. - Medea

...there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals- whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.

There may be more danger in prejudices which are apparently founded in logic than in those which are acknowledged as emotions. (p69)

There was no one to blame but the mighty, ruthless stranger. Thus was complexity reduced to demonology, which is a defining feature of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, or, indeed, any "anti-ism.

There’s a general sense now that children’s rights, children’s needs, children’s wants and desires have taken on too prominent a place in our family lives. That we’ve over indulged them and now have to tighten the reins. The backlash is, at base, against ourselves — against a form of boomer and postboomer parenting that many agree has gone off the rails. But the targets of that backlash — its victims — are children. 'People as individuals and in societies mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them, to project internal conflicts and self-hatreds outward, or to assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned,' Young-Bruehl wrote. We often use children as pillars for our narcissism, she said, and, in particular, tend to use them to provide salve for our narcissistic wounds. The more that we’re wounded — and, I think it’s fair to argue that almost all of us have been wounded in the devastating economic downturn of the past several years — the more angrily we make our demands. The more adults feel 'beleaguered and without power,' she noted, the more rage they vent at their kids for not making them feel valued, respected, even loved. Young-Bruehl noted that the concept of childism can — and should — force us to think differently about the whole range of parent behavior ranging from spanking to child abuse, just like the acknowledgment of sexism in society led us decades ago to think differently about rape. With a heightened understanding of prejudice against women, rape came to be seen less as an outgrowth of unrestrained male libido and more as a perverse manifestation of the abuse of male power: incest too, soon afterward, came to be seen in that light. Her extrapolation from sexism to childism teaches, then, that we can’t simply think of freakish acts of child abuse — like the case of the 9-year-old Alabama girl run to death by her stepmother and grandmother as punishment for eating a candy bar — as entirely isolated crimes. We have to think of them in a context of prejudice against children — and of diffuse adult feelings of impotence and rage — that is widespread enough that it’s all too easy for an unbalanced parent to cross the line between discipline and abuse.

There’s the claim that the only progress made is in posing problems that scientists can answer. That philosophy never has the means to answer problems—it’s just biding its time till the scientists arrive on the scene. You hear this quite often. There is, among some scientists, a real anti-philosophical bias. The sense that philosophy will eventually disappear. But there’s a lot of philosophical progress, it’s just a progress that’s very hard to see. It’s very hard to see because we see with it. We incorporate philosophical progress into our own way of viewing the world. [...] And it’s usually philosophical arguments that first introduce the very outlandish idea that we need to extend rights. And it takes more, it takes a movement, and activism, and emotions, to affect real social change. It starts with an argument, but then it becomes obvious. The tracks of philosophy’s work are erased because it becomes intuitively obvious. The arguments against slavery, against cruel and unusual punishment, against unjust wars, against treating children cruelly—these all took arguments. About 30 years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer started to argue about the way animals are treated in our factory farms. Everybody thought he was nuts. But I’ve watched this movement grow; I’ve watched it become emotional. It has to become emotional. You have to draw empathy into it. But here it is, right in our time—a philosopher making the argument, everyone dismissing it, but then people start discussing it.

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.

There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn't we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.

The right wing has a large proportion of authoritarian personalities. They tend to believe man is, by nature, basically evil. Surrounded as all of us are by the bigness of impersonal forces which seem beyond our power to control, they look for the 'enemy', so that they can hate him. At different times in history 'the enemy' has been the witch, the demon, the Communist (remember Joe McCarthy?), and now sex education, sensitivity training, 'non-religious humanism', and other current demons. - attributed to James E. Harmon

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

the stigma of severe mental illness leads to prejudice and discrimination. Stigmas are negative and erroneous attitudes about these persons. Unfortunately, stigma's impact on a person's life may be as harmful as the direct effects of the disease. Corrigan, P. W., & Penn, D. L. (1999). Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma. American Psychologist, 54(9), 765–776.

These passive prejudices were not necessarily from a place of ugly, but they certainly weren’t from a place of respect.

These southern workers were more interested in protecting their prejudices than their interests.

The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather [...] it responds with 'benign neglect' [....] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties.

The system that aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as in the circus where the trainer teaches the lion to sit on a stool, has not understood the true meaning of education itself. Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.

The syntax of prejudice—threaded into conversation with the perfect pauses and facial expressions—was like ciphers and spy codes. The meaning clear to those it was meant for. To everyone else, it was harmless scribbles. Easy enough to deny.

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.

The tenderest and most generous minds, when harshly treated, become generally the most inflexible.

The unique stigma of PTSD. The stigma of PTSD remains one of the most formidable barriers to effective care.

The upscale neighborhoods in Blue Sky Hill weren't all lily white anymore, but you could be sure their kids didn't wear our kind of clothes, or get free lunches at the Summer Kitchen, or pick up used books and magazines down at the Book Basket store, or go to the public school. These days it wasn't about what color you were, but how much money you had. The same, only different. It was still people not wanting to be with people who weren't their kind.

The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. And the second-worst mistake is to think you aren't looking though the lens of your prejudices.

This is not a book about whether one can be good without God, because that question does not need to be answered --it needs to be rejected outright. To suggest that one can't be good without belief in God is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing -- it is a prejudice.

They'd pay attention to me less. They'd judge me by gender, by looks, by weight before anything else. I automatically started every interaction at a disadvantage.

They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice.

This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

This is how hatred begins -- with a muffled laugh on a hot night and a knock on the door.