Prejudice Quotes

Everybody comes with prejudices, colored glasses on their eyes. Then they see everything colored according to their glasses. Yes, a few people come just like you, unprejudiced, without any idea gathered from yellow journalism.

~ Osho

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.

~ Zadie Smith

We Pashtuns love shoes but don't love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban—to finally achieve status and power.

~ Malala Yousafzai

As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be.

~ Audre Lorde

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.

~ Audre Lorde

What is surprising, even deeply disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice, hold on tenaciously to a standard language ideology which attempts to justify restriction of individuality and rejection of the Other

~ Rosina Lippi-Green

Never judge badly a rage of a very patient heart who had let go many repetitive offenses from insufferable bastards.

~ Angelica Hopes

...the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round in rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do not understand this.

~ Maxim Gorky

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

~ Lillian Hellman

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.

~ Richard Wright

It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of ancient tribal hatreds. I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.

~ Paul Rusesabagina

People know me by the way I live my life, not by the labels I wear, and that means we can hold all sorts of conversations and learn from each other in a way that would not happen if there were the walls of ignorant prejudice between us. --Oisce

~ Arin Murphy-Hiscock

Their faces were clay-coloured and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips.

~ Rebecca West

It also appears to me that when prejudices persist obstinately, it is the fault of nobody so much as of those who make a point of proclaiming them insuperable, as an excuse to themselves for never joining in an attempt to remove them. Any prejudice whatever will be insurmountable if those who do not share it themselves truckle to it, and flatter it, and accept it as a law of nature.

~ John Stuart Mill

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.

~ Lisa Wingate

'Not drinking?' Collin asked coolly. 'I only drink the blood of virgins,' Logan quipped. 'You must be dehydrated then.' A slow smile spread over Logan's face. 'A sense of humor... rare in a Templar.'

~ Lia Black

Murdered by a kind of fear that seeks to obliterate any evidence that the world is different from the way they want to see it, from the way they want to believe it to be.

~ Lana Wachowski

It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.

~ Reginald Rose

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.

~ George Washington

Dr. Lister, who treated the wounded Pres. Garfield, had been so stung by the medical establishment's reaction to his embrace of African-American doctors that he, in response, refused to do part from the status quo enough to considering using antiseptic techniques.

~ Candice Millard

Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.

~ A.j. Withers

Why don’t they complain?They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion.

~ Amitav Ghosh

It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

~ Lord Paulmerston

I think people are as individual as snowflakes, they kinda look alike but no two are the exactly the same, and all classification is the root of prejudice.

~ Craig Ferguson

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.

~ Greg M. Epstein

What's it like here?There's a biscuit factory next door. We get the broken ones.

~ Hiedi Thomas Jennifer Worth

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.

~ Malcolm Gladwell

People in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say,'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.'Or they can be in negative sentiment override, said that even a relatively new tool thing that a partner says get perceived as negative. In negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change their states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.

~ John Gottberg

Fear is different,it remains,it causes prejudice.

~ John-Talmage Mathis

I wanted to go in and tell them that, but George thought it would just be stirring up some trouble, you know, stirring up the cow pile. A cow pile may looked dried up, but if you stir it up, it can start to stink again.

~ K. Martin Beckner

The first domesticated animal was the scapegoat.

~ Yanko Tsvetkov

By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its 'infection' with bias and prejudice. Lyotard's critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy - indeed, no knowledge - is untainted by prejudice or faith commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created. Thus Lyotard's postmodern critique of metanarratives, rather than being a formidable foe of Christian faith and thought, can in fact be enlisted as an ally in the construction of a Christian philosophy.

~ James K.a. Smith

If you're searching for the truth, throw out all your prejudices and just gather the facts. If you do that, you'll be able to see the real truth.

~ Clamp

O prejudice, prejudice, prejudice, how many hast thou destroyed! Men who might have been wise have remained fools because they thought they were wise. Many judge what the gospel ought to be, but do not actually enquire as to what it is. They do not come to the Bible to obtain their views of religion, but they open that Book to find texts to suit the opinions which they bring to it. They are not open to the honest force of truth, and therefore are not saved by it.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

People cannot handle prejudice because they try to deal with the symptom. Prejudice is the symptom, wrong assumptions are the cause.'Prejudice is the daughter of assumption.

~ Idries Shah

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

~ Philip Dormer Stanhope

Witches, warlocks, gremlins, orgres - they're just words,labels. Haven't you noticed that when people are labelled, their faces disappear?

~ Anna Fienberg

He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.

~ Neil Gaiman

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

~ David Pietrusza

I have always thought foreigners with their unusual skin colours, mad languages and ignorant customs absolutely hilarious, and I think it's a shame that in recent years its become unfashionable to poke fun at them. I certainly don't think they themselves ever minded it.

~ Arthur Mathews