Prejudice Quotes

Prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

~ Ambrose Bierce

All the dreams you show up in are not your own.

~ Gil Scott-Heron

I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.

~ Thomas Hardy

Do not ask questions until you have trained yourself not to know the answers.

~ Jack Gardner

We refuse to let our knowledge, however limited, be informed by your ignorance, however vast.

~ David Ray Griffin

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.

~ Bell Hooks

A comment that starts with the words I think usually means the opposite.

~ Jack Gardner

A counter to a jab is a left hook. What’s the counter to prejudice?

~ Cameron Conaway

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I don't mind bigots. You're allowed to be bigoted, if that makes you happy. Just do it at home. And not around the children.

~ Maureen Johnson

This world that we live in would be perfect if there were less prejudice and people who think they are better than others.

~ Werley Nortreus

Every generation is inculcated in traditions of prejudice which are encouraged as normal, natural and healthy.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Thinking? You're not thinking. You're reasoning without reasons, and that's just another word for prejudice.

~ Anthony Mcgowan

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

~ Gregory Maguire

What is it about humans that make us so prone to prejudice?”Blue arches one of his unnaturally colored eyebrows and looks up to meet my gaze. “If we didn’t form prejudices, we wouldn’t be learning from our environment, you dolt. It’s an animal instinct. If a porcupine’s quill gets stuck in your hand once, you won’t be likely to go grabbing it again soon, right?

~ Rhi Etzweiler

As she grew older, Maddy discovered that she had disappointed almost everyone. An awkward girl with a sullen mouth, a curtain of hair, and a tendency to slouch, she had neither Mae's sweet nature nor sweet face. Her eyes were rather beautiful, but few people ever noticed this, and it was widely believed Maddy was ugly, a troublemaker, too clever for her own good, too stubborn - or too slack - to change.Of course, folk agreed that it was not her fault she was so brown or her sister so pretty, but a smile costs nothing, as the saying goes, and if only the girl had made an effort once in a while, or even showed a little gratitude for all the help and free advice, then maybe she would have settled down.

~ Joanne Harris

[Beneatha Younger:]... He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Chrisitan fellowship. [excerpt from Act II, Scene 3]

~ Lorraine Hansberry

Why, you may ask, didn't we have a cow tonight? No one would sell Bayard one. He had the brilliant idea of telling the farmers why he wanted the cow. The God-fearing folk would sell their cows to be eaten, but not for raising zombies. Prejudiced bastards.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

It is founded on the worst instincts of mankind. At its best, it is intolerant and bigoted. At its worst, it is sadistic and brutal. Between these two poles it has its existence.

~ Susan Carol Mccarthy

...but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.

~ George Eliot

Remember this as long as you live: Whenever you meet up with anyone who is trying to cause trouble between people, anyone who tries to tell you that a man can't be a good American because he's a Catholic, or a Jew, a Protestant, or whatever, you can be pretty sure he's a rotten American himself. Not only a rotten American, but a rotten human being. Don't ever forget that.

~ Superman

If a man fears dogs, he may beat one with a stick when he sees it. As is the nature of all creatures, that dog will bite him. And then he may tell everyone that he was right about dogs, that they are evil. But I ask you, who is at fault in this scenario, the man or the dog?

~ Adriana Mather

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.

~ Alexander Hamilton

Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.

~ Thomas Paine

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

~ Colson Whitehead

His own mother’s blood was mixed between her Lakota mother and a French trapper. His father’s family came from Scotland to escape the English. The differences weren’t a problem with his mother’s people but among his father’s there was intolerance and prejudice.

~ A.g. Graham

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

~ Alex Lamb

I do not care for prejudice in any form. In my opinion, we women have been subjected to so much of it that I cannot see how anyone of my sex could fail to identify with those similarly oppressed.

~ Dianne Day

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.

~ Paul La Farge

But in the absence of eye-witness there's always a doubt, sometimes only the shadow of a doubt. The law says 'reasonable doubt', but I think a defendant's entitled to the shadow of doubt. There's always the possibility, no matter how improbable, that he's innocent.

~ Harper Lee

Imagine you’re diagnosed with epilepsy: what would you think if you weren’t referred to a specialist but taken to a psychiatrist to treat you for your ‘false illness beliefs’?This is what happens to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) patients in the UK. They are told to ignore their symptoms, view themselves as healthy, and increase their exercise. The NHS guidelines amalgamate ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, assuming symptoms are caused by deconditioning and ‘exercise phobia’. Sufferers are offered Graded Exercise to increase fitness, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to rid them of their ‘false illness beliefs’.

~ Tanya Marlow

Still, it seemed to us that the main reason we were hated must be that we always lived by stealing. From the earliest times, rats lived around the edges of human cities and farms, stowed away on men's ships, gnawed holes in their floors and stole their food. Sometimes we were accused of biting human children; I didn't believe that, nor did any of us⎼unless it was some kind of a subnormal rat, bred in the worst of city slums. And that, of course, can happen to people, too.

~ Robert C. O'brien

Recently, I have seen an increasing amount of disdain for political corectness, and I’ve been wondering why. Why is there so much hatred for a concept that was created solely so that people would respect one another?

~ Cate O'brien

That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

The love of God pays no attention to my prejudices caused by my natural individuality.

~ Oswald Chambers

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.

~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

I once heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever a student wearing blue shirt had committed a mistake. I thought that was pretty bad. I then heard of a class teacher who’d punish every student wearing a blue shirt whenever someone in blue shirt committed a mistake somewhere else. Clearly, the worst is not a reality.

~ Pawan Mishra

You are blinded,” said Dumbledore, his voice rising now, the aura of power around him palpable, his eyes blazing once more, “by the love of the office you hold, Cornelius! You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow up to be!

~ J.k. Rowling

A part of me understands the need to keep order, but another part worries that we are being led to fear the wrong things. It's just like Chinatown and all the laws passed to contain us. We were never the enemy. The enemy was our country's own fear.

~ Stacey Lee