Best 1441 quotes in «diversity quotes» category

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

The greatest risk most of us will take in our lifetime is that of repression or denial of basic rights of another person. The great risk is that you have no idea what will happen if that person you think so small or insignificant of stands up and totally eclipses the Sun in the universe of those lacking in empathy, humility, and humbleness.

The Great Magician is very clear when he says there will always be trouble in the world. As for any human today, in my book, that is a call to action. That’s a call to our own inner hero. That hero is inside all of us whether we be fat, skinny, tall, short, black, white, olive, or yellow. We all have the capacity to be heroes in this life.

The hatred was, in a word, monochromatic.

The immigration laws that were in force until 1965 were a continuation of earlier laws written to maintain a white majority. However, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and accommodation, a racially restrictive immigration policy was an embarrassment. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965—also known as the Hart-Celler Act—abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all parts of the world. Its backers, however, emphasized that they did not expect it to have much impact. “Under the proposed bill,” explained Senator Edward Kennedy, “the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area.” The senator suggested that at most 62,000 people a year might immigrate. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: “This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives . . . .” The backers were wrong. In 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations 70 and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. Large parts of the country are being transformed by immigration. But the larger point is that “diversity” of the kind that immigration is now said to provide was never proposed as one of the law’s benefits. No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would reduce whites to a racial minority in California in little more than 20 years. In 1965—before diversity had been decreed a strength—Americans would have been shocked by the prospect of demographic shifts of this kind. Whites were close to 90 percent of the American population, and immigration reform would have failed if its backers had accurately predicted its demographic consequences.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

The issue here revolves around the "right to be different (Mattos 1994:16). People have difficulty living harmoniously with those who are different. Because of this, they discriminate against anyone who has any distinctive characteristic whether of belief, religion, language, thought or color. ~ Valmor Da Silva p. 124 in Reading Other-Wise

The irony is that while our world might plead for change, it does its best to suppress it.

The journey was a worthwhile. We gain new insight into cultural diversity.

The kids in my class are like a jumbo pack of assorted party lollies – they’re all different, but I like them all.

The literature of America should reflect the children of America.

The Libertarian Party convention wasn’t much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled 'Women of Liberty.' All of the speakers were women, and all of the topics boiled down to 'Effectively Communicating Libertarian Ideas to Women' — in other words, 'How to talk to girls.' Looking around at the nearly entirely white male audience, it wasn’t hard to see why they chose this tack.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), set up in 1968 by breakaway LULAC members, was modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It has filed lawsuits in support of social benefits for illegal aliens and affirmative action for Hispanics, and against border control. One of its first executives was Mario Obledo, who also served as California secretary of health and welfare. In an interview on radio station KIEV in Los Angeles on June 17, 1998, he warned listeners: “We’re going to take over all the political institutions of California. California is going to be a Hispanic state and anyone who doesn’t like it should leave. If they [whites] don’t like Mexicans, they ought to go back to Europe.” That same year, President Bill Clinton awarded Mr. Obledo the Medal of Freedom.

The more intimate the setting, the greater the challenges of diversity. Adopted children, for example, often report they never felt they fit in. In a British study of adults who were adopted as children, 46 percent of whites adopted by whites said they felt a sense of not belonging. For non-whites adopted by whites, the figure rose to close to 75 percent. Researchers reported that their constant refrain was, “Love is not enough.” There can be worse: The authors of a 2005 study on domestic violence in the United States reached the sobering conclusion that “the incidence of spousal homicide is 7.7 times higher in interracial marriages compared to intraracial marriages.” One study for the period 1979 to 1981 found that white men who married black women were 21.4 times more likely to be killed by their spouses than white men who married white women. A white woman increased her risk of being killed 12.4 times by marrying a black man. Marrying a white did not appreciably change a black person’s risk of being killed by his or her spouse.

The modern world is the opposite of the aspiration expressed in Doctor Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech. In that speech, Doctor King stated his ideal vision of a future where his children would be judged not 'by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' There is an even-greater obsession with race today and the external packaging we come in. Content of character is secondary, if not completely irrelevant.

The more believers are willing to leave their own comfort zone and be genuinely comfortable with people from diverse backgrounds, the more the Lord can use them to minister to others.

The more sects we have the better. They are all getting somebody in (to the Church) that the others could not: and even with the numerous divisions we are all doing tolerably well.

The Nation of Islam is the best known Black Muslim group, though its actual numbers may be no more than 100,000. However, many blacks who are not, themselves, Muslims have great respect for the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan. Users of the Internet arm of Black Entertainment Television, BET.com, chose him as the black “person of the year” for 2005. Mr. Farrakhan was elected over Oprah Winfrey, then-Senator Barack Obama, Robert L. Johnson, who started BET, and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “An overwhelming percentage of our users agreed that Minister Farrakhan made the most positive impact on the Black community over the past year,” explained a BET spokesman. What did Mr. Farrakhan do to deserve that honor? He received heavy news coverage twice that year. Once was when he promoted the theory that whites blew up the New Orleans levees to destroy black neighborhoods. The other was when he organized a “Millions More Movement” on the National Mall to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March. On that occasion, Michael Muhammad, National Youth Minister for the Nation of Islam declaimed: “We want to say to our young brothers of the Crips and the Bloods that we are one family. The real enemy doesn’t wear blue, but white, even when he’s butt naked.” Ayinde Baptiste of the Nation of Islam added: “We are at war here in America. . . . We need soldiers now. We need black male soldiers, we need black feminist soldiers, we need Crips and Bloods soldiers . . . soldiers in the prisons, soldiers in the streets.” The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the event, and five black congressmen attended it.

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that.

The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees. Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distort it to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashion shows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. As we heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we had gone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrel show featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted. When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “just having fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhaps they are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child who goes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past. I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every social species, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts. The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with minds sufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; the sum of all interactions determine the nature of societies. At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based around race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being truly open-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have an appallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges are voting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at the idea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirable rights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to have perverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.” When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When we question stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance in general.

The page we have in our colouring book may appear to have a similar outline but we all vary in the way we fill in the space. Diversity keeps us interesting. Celebrate your differences.

The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.

The psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued that parenting has a threshold function: up until that threshold is crossed, the effects of a child's very early experience even out in the end. But parenting that crosses the threshold—abuse, stress, utter indifference—can sink in deep, especially if the baby remains in that environment. There's a lot to be said for this perspective on parenthood, not least that it offers well-meaning parents some relief from scaremongering. It also accounts for the astounding flexibility of the human infant: he is game for the craziest parenting stuff you can come up with.

The push for diversity can lead to absurd results. Bone marrow donations almost never work unless donor and recipient are the same race, so non-white patients suffer because almost all the people who register as donors are white. In 2008, the National Marrow Donor Program announced that all marrow registries would be required to meet quotas for minority donors. Officials at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise, Idaho said they would have to shut down their donor registry because the demographics of the region made it impossible to find more than a handful of non-white donors. Likewise, the largely white Amity Regional School District that serves the eastern suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut, stood to lose tens of thousands of dollars in federal money because it did not have enough non-white autistic students. The district had no control over who was diagnosed with the condition, but federal officials said a ratio of 38 whites, one black, and one Asian was “significantly disproportionate,” and threatened to withhold $67,000.

The racial conflict and self-segregation described [...] are not what we would expect if widespread assumptions about the advantages of diversity are true. The prevailing view in the media and some parts of academia is that race is not even a legitimate biological category, and that it is only because of prejudiced conditioning that we even notice it. This view ignores the large body of scientific work that suggests racial and ethnic consciousness is deeply rooted in human psychology. Our species seems to have an instinct for determining who is in our group and who is not. Studies of individuals point to unconscious processes in the brain that reflect a suspicion of people unlike ourselves, leading some researchers to conclude that ethnocentrism is part of human nature. At the same time, studies at the group level show that ethnic conflict is universal. In all countries, diversity of religion, ethnicity, or race causes conflict. For the better part of the post-war period, sociologists and political scientists downplayed ethnic conflict, on the assumption that it was a pre modern relic that would be replaced by competition based on class or professional affiliation. This has not happened. As one researcher has concluded, “ethnicity based on common descent tends to be more important than class based on common interest. Blood runs thicker than money.” It is from two directions, therefore, that scientists have begun to question the view that ethnic or racial mixing can be easily achieved. Laboratory investigations of individuals have found what may be tribal or ethnocentric instincts, while analysis of societies suggests that diversity invariably brings conflict.

There is a theoretical framework that explains ethnocentrism. As the Belgian authority on ethnic relations Pierre L. van den Berghe put it more than 25 years ago, “The degree of cooperation between organisms can be expected to be a direct function of the proportion of the genes they share; conversely, the degree of conflict between them is an inverse function of the proportion of shared genes.” Van den Berghe used the word “organisms” because he found this principle true in animals as well as people. When there is great genetic distance between strangers—in the case of humans, when they are of different races—conflicts are sharper. It is easy to understand the first part of van den Berghe’s proposition. People everywhere make great sacrifices for their families. The evolutionary explanation is that everyone shares more copies of his distinctive genes with close kin than with strangers. All forms of life can be viewed as striving to pass on their genes to future generations. Each individual therefore has a “genetic interest” in close relatives, which helps explain solidarity and cooperation within families.

The realization of dreams, like every battle for freedom, has always required compromise to one degree or another. When the result of a concession, however, is the mutilation of your soul or the cancellation of someone else's future, then it may be said the desired goal was corrupted or destroyed rather than attained.

There is a field of study called “happiness research,” which tries to analyze what makes people happy. Prof. Michael Hagerty of the University of California at Davis surveyed decades of international happiness research and found that “for the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” As he explained, such countries “have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives.” He also noted that “they don’t have race problems.” In the conclusion of his 148-country diversity survey Tatu Vanhanen wrote, “It is easier to establish harmonious social relations in ethnically homogeneous societies than in ethnically divided ones because people are more helpful towards each other in ethnically homogeneous societies.” There can, of course, be many different kinds of division in a country: language, religion, race, class, etc. However, of all these, race seems to be the most difficult to bridge.

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

There is, however, one natural feature of this country, the interest and grandeur of which may be fully appreciated in a single walk: it is the ‘virgin forest’. Here no one who has any feeling of the magnificent and the sublime can be disappointed; the sombre shade, scarce illumined by a single direct ray even of the tropical sun, the enormous size and height of the trees, most of which rise like huge columns a hundred feet or more without throwing out a single branch, the strange buttresses around the base of some, the spiny or furrowed stems of others, the curious and even extraordinary creepers and climbers which wind around them, hanging in long festoons from branch to branch, sometimes curling and twisting on the ground like great serpents, then mounting to the very tops of the trees, thence throwing down roots and fibres which hang waving in the air, or twisting round each other form ropes and cables of every variety of size and often of the most perfect regularity. These, and many other novel features – the parasitic plants growing on the trunks and branches, the wonderful variety of the foliage, the strange fruits and seeds that lie rotting on the ground – taken altogether surpass description, and produce feelings in the beholder of admiration and awe. It is here, too, that the rarest birds, the most lovely insects, and the most interesting mammals and reptiles are to be found. Here lurk the jaguar and the boa-constrictor, and here amid the densest shade the bell-bird tolls his peal.

There is so much diversity in Indie films and books already. Saying there is a lack of Asians in films or in television is not accurate. It is out there, but not so much on the big screen. Rather than saying let's make more big studio Asian American films, let's say, let's bring more and highlight more Asian American films - indie or big studio out prominently in the press and media so there are more different Asian voices heard. - The Asian American Experience Anthology By Kailin Gow

There is no higher consciousness. There are just different ways of perceiving things.

There is no such thing as an “African man” or any uniquely African values—it is diversity that has created Africa’s greatest wealth and its identity.

There is nothing sane, merciful, heroic, devout, redemptive, wise, holy, loving, peaceful, joyous, righteous, gracious, remotely spiritual, or worthy of praise where mass murder is concerned. We have been in this world long enough to know that by now and to understand that nonviolent conflict resolution informed by mutual compassion is the far better option.

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive.

There just seemed to be so many evolutionary layers to each individual person, some more than others, that they were able to blend their differences into a living mural the way a planet like Hessdalen never could. And never would, seeing as how it had ceased to exist entirely. It had missed it's chance.

There're many ways to inspire others but the goal is the same. The pathways are different and must be; because we're diverse. The destination must be the same; to inspire them, so they too can inspire others.

[There] was a time when a lot of people came to the door. The milkman. The iceman. The Fuller Brush man. Encyclopedia salesmen. There was a sense of interaction with the world that started right at your own front doorstep.

There should be no single representation in the autism world. Think about this if someone got up on stage and talked about having “non-autistic syndrome” and made the assumption every one with this syndrome is the same we would be in big trouble. That applies to autism as well - it isn't one condition, there are profile differences between Autism and AS and all autism "fruits salads" are different. That is how diverse autism is.

There's no beauty without difference and diversity. Love unconditionally.

There's nothing good about diversity, other than the food, and we don't need 128 million Mexicans for the restaurants.

There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.

There was a flap in Fremont, California, about how to celebrate the Fourth. The city put up American flags, to be sure, but vice mayor Steven Cho thought this was not inclusive enough, so the American flag shared honors with flags from 25 other countries, including Qatar and Mongolia. San Francisco celebrates diversity with cash. In 1999, the Cinco de Mayo Carnival and Parade got $162,500, the Japanese Cherry Blossom Parade got $40,000, the American Indian Festival got $27,000, Martin Luther King Day got $21,000, Juneteenth got $13,000, Samoan Flag Day got $12,000, and the Min Sok Korean Festival got $7,500. Veterans were angry to be fobbed off with only $1,000 for Veterans Day.

There was no single gay point of view. Like skin color or gender or any of those arbitrary, sometimes artificial, difference sexual orientation didn't make us all the same. But it did affect us. It had to.

There was no way she'd allow him to see her do 97 percent of her normal activities. She was a monster. A monster who was flat as a board with no ass. In fact, the only thing she had going on in the curves department was an enormous cystic pimple on her chin that hurt when she touched it. Yeah, no.

There was no way Penny would go to House and let Sam see her. That would ruin everything. Sam would take one look at her and be like, "Yikes, never mind.

There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. ... Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making.

The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.

The rural, mid-19th-century dialect, coupled with the author's interest in ethnobotany, roots the story deeply in the houses, forests, gardens, and even streambeds of antebellum Virginia. –School Library Journal