Quotes About Identity

Each human being has his or her own sexual identity and should be able to exercise that identity without guilt as long as they do not force that sexual identity on others.

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.

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.

I have this very kind of like heterodox idea of what an education is, what underpins identity. I don't think I'm very easily pigeon holed in any of those boxes, so I confront this. I have a staff full of young people who came up in a very different tradition and who feel very fired up about the big identity battles. I listen and I try to navigate them, but I don't find them mapping onto my life in a personal way which is, which is hard.

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 major strategy of Satan is to distort the character of God and the truth of who we are. He can't change God and he can't do anything to change our identity and position in Christ. If, however, he can get us to believe a lie, we will live as though our identity in Christ isn't true.

. . . Cultivating good humor may be helpful in finding our own identity. Young people who are trying to find out who they really are often have concerns as to their ability to meet and cope with the challenges that confront them and that lie ahead. They will find that it is easier to ride over the bumps and come quickly to their own identity if they cultivate the good humor that comes naturally. It is important that we all learn to laugh at ourselves.

Teaching a practice can also be a hindrance if it becomes one's identity. To be a spiritual teacher is a temporary function. I'm a spiritual teacher when somebody comes to me and some teaching happens, but the moment they leave I'm no longer a spiritual teacher. If I carry the identity of spiritual teacher, it will cause suffering.

Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in relation to time. Age has become much more divisive than place. With the Internet and globalization, a twenty-year-old in New York has far more cultural references in common with a twenty-year-old in Nebraska than they do with a thirty-year-old who lives next door. National identity is what they trick you with when they want your feet in their army boots or your taxes in their bailouts.

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Music is a vital part of my life, and it has been since I was a kid. It helped me find my identity as a person, it helped me find my identity as an artist, and it helped me get in touch with emotions that I didn't know I had.

2006 Games -by then, my identity had started to shift. Before that, my identity was in snowboarding. That's how people knew me and that's how I knew myself. That's where I got a lot of my self worth. That began to shift and I started to understand that I didn't get my worth from people or from the things that I did. It was from Christ. If I hadn't had that shift in my life, I think my world would have come crumbling down.

Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.

One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

"Spiritual teacher" of course is not an identity. "Spiritual teacher" is a function. Somebody comes, the teaching happens. Somebody leaves, there's no spiritual teacher left.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

In my career, I've really wanted to sort of be a morpher and not show my own identity.

We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. The normal mistake we all make is to identify ourselves with some content of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself. Some people get their identity from their feelings, others from their thoughts, others from their social roles. But this identification with a part of the personality destroys the freedom which comes from the experience of the pure “I”.

It is unrealistic to think you can have an inflexible identity that never has to give or take or make compromises.

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.

When we recognize how precious and truly glorious we are, then we become humbled by that and recognize everyone's true spiritual identity. And then our greatest joy is in sharing.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself.

It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent, self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening.

Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.

Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.

The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

For the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity may be assumed, each class resembles a hotel or an omnibus, always full, but always of different people.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

Directors should not be forced to advocate anything in their works because of their demographic identity.

We can think of solutions in various theoretical ways, but it's not so on the ground. If they don't have a reference that helps them to belong, then they will end up excluding, and through that they get to feel that they belong on the basis of some narrow identity, language or color.

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life. ~ Bran

Foster children are disproportionately victims of identity theft.

Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know. Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can't be approached or withdrawn from, benefited or harmed, honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures.

I've seen it [Australia] go from a lot of small towns to big towns, but I think it has found its identity in all this time... it's a very special country, I could easily live here.

I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.

The stronger the identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction.

In saying my prayers, I discovered the voice of an innermost self, the raw nerve of my identity.

A conviction that you are a daughter of God gives you a feeling of comfort in your self-worth. It means that you can find strength in the balm of Christ. It will help you meet the heartaches and challenges with faith and serenity. ... A woman can and must have an identity and feel useful, valued, and needed whether she is single or married. She must feel that she can do something for someone else that no one else ever born can do

For me, places are articulations of 'natural' and social relations, relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded - which, politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not 'given' - they are always in open-ended process. They are in that sense 'events'. Third, they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk about local-level struggles for hegemony).

I was confused as a kid. I was confused about my sexual identity.

I'd say my relation to being a woman is, I mean being a woman is whatever you want because the concept of gender is not really real, you know? And so for me it's about being comfortable in myself. It's about allowing myself to express who I am in any way that I want to, whether that be through my clothing, the way I present myself to the world, whether that be through like my gender identity and my pronouns. It's just really about allowing yourself to really be expressive and creative.