Quotes About Identity

All third world literature is about nation, that identity is the fundamental literary problem in the third world. The writer's identity is insecure because the nation's identity is not secure. The nation doesn't provide the third world writer with a secure identity, because the nation is colonized, it's oppressed, it's part of somebody else's empire.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it's been a white identity that's been rendered invisible and neutral because it's seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don't pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go.

When you find your authentic self, your identity - your true identity - how many people work a job they hate or live a life, they're going oh my gosh.

Identity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my queerness . But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

The Negro wants to be everything but himself... He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.

With motocross I've found that passion becomes your identity and that identity breaks all barriers.

America's grand strategy did not come from nowhere. It followed from our deeper conception of ourselves, and our American identity. Who are we, Americans? What is our nation? We are not an ethnostate with identity rooted in shared blood. The option of a white man's republic ended at Appomattox.

Identity is a concept of our age that should be used very carefully. All types of identities, ethnic, national, religious, sexual or whatever else, can become your prison after a while. The identity that you stand up for can enslave you and close you to the rest of the world.

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation.

Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity with nature. We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there.

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

We've organized human potential and have been better at using human potential better than any country on the face of the Earth. That's because we've recognized that our national creed, our national identity, is that it doesn't matter where you're from, it matters where you're going. You can come from hard circumstances and do great things. We've got to make that true for a whole variety of people who no longer feel that.

Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.

Because of the internet and communications, the clash of cultures is much more direct. People feel, I think, less certain about their identity, less certain about economic security.

Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity.

Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely thatwhich all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt.

Nothing is really lost or can be lost, No birth, identity, form--no object of the world, Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing... The body, sluggish, aged , cold--the embers left from early fires, ...shall duly flame again

I think that there are times when Puertoricans think, "Oh, we are blessed with the relationship with the U.S." But the end result will not be that. If Puerto Rico becomes similar to Hawaii - well, the Hawaiian Native population is about 9 percent. And if we go to the prisons, the overwhelming majority of the prisoners are the Natives. So I can anticipate that Puerto Ricans will not be better off by the annexation of the U.S. of Puerto Rico. I also know for a fact that once any nation or any people lose their identity, their language, their lifestyles, that they are a little dehumanized.

Demonstration, similitude & harmony are objects of reasoning. Invention, identity & melody are objects of intuition.

Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

My first guiding principle is this: willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.

Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

When we talk about feminism - equality without apology for ALL - we can't be talking about for all white women or all highly educated women but all women, regardless of color, class, creed, sexual orientation or identity.

For me fashion is an expression of art that is very closely related both to me and to my body. I see it as an expression of identity combined with desire, moods and a cultural setting.

Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.

It's just like I get this identity crisis: my body doesn't want to write, my mind doesn't want to write. Nothing about me wants to write, but I force myself to sit there and try. Nothing happens.

When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon.

And the associated danger for the identity of Europe cannot be ignored out of a wrongly understood sense of respect... The Catholic side sees this clearly and says as much.

Never let anyone shame you into doing anything you don't choose to do. Keep your identity.

How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplomacy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things--amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact.

Therefore they should come to the table and reach an agreement that would protect their identity.

The backstory to anyone of mixed race is a lifetime spent being incorrectly perceived and choosing either to allow that misperception to continue or to correct it, so I am aware of identity and race as being much more fluid, I think, than someone who is "purely" one thing or the other. And acting does challenge me to address those particular issues.

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.

I think that one not only has to make demands on the established group, but one also has to make demands on the outsider group. One has to make clear: if you want to leave, please do so. But if you want to stay here, a degree of accommodation to the Dutch outlook, Dutch manners, and a degree of identification with the Netherlands will be expected of you. There is no reason why there cannot be Dutch Turks or Dutch Moroccans. But one can expect from them a degree of identification, some change of their own social identity.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.