prejudices Quotes

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”

“This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being white.”

“It’s funny how you forget the rules. She was not supposed to be inside here. Every time a rumor got going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning, the deacons stood locked-arms across the church stems to turn them away. We loved them in the Lord, Brother Gerald said, but they had their own places.”

“T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.”

“But I will tell you this secret thing, which not one of them saw, not even August, the thing that brought me the most cause for gladness. It was how Sugar-Girl said what she did, like I was truly one of them. Not one person in the room said, ‘Sugar-Girl, really, talking about white people like that and we have a white person present.’ They didn’t even think of me being different.”

″‘We can’t think of changing our skin,’ he said. ‘Change the world—that’s how we gotta think.‘”

″. . . I looked around me, and it was like seeing everything through a train’s thick window. A blur passed before me. A moving wave of color. ‘I am not one of you,’ I thought.”

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

“He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.”

“I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created.” “I am,” said he, with a firm voice. “And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?” “I hope not.”

“Soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome ‘Anglo-Saxon devils.’ This racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented served as an accelerant for the abuse of Allied prisoners.”

“I know you now, old enemies of mine! Falsehood! . . . Have at you! Ha! and Compromise! Prejudice, Treachery!. . . Surrender, I? Parley? No, never! You too, Folly,—you? I know that you will lay me low at last; Let be! Yet I fall fighting, fighting still!”

“’My friend,’ said the orator to him, ‘do you believe the Pope to be Anti-Christ?’ ‘I have not heard it,’ answered Candide; ‘but whether he be, or whether he be not, I want bread.’ ‘Thou dost not deserve to eat,’ said the other. ‘Begone, rogue; begone, wretch; do not come near me again.’ The orator’s wife, putting her head out of the window, and spying a man that doubted whether the Pope was Anti-Christ, poured over him a full.... Oh, heavens! to what excess does religious zeal carry the ladies.

″[Mrs. Pentstemmon] had said Sophie was a witch. Oddly enough, Sophie accepted this without any trouble at all. That explained the popularity of certain hats, she thought. It explained Jane Farrier’s Count Whatsit. It possibly explained the jealousy of the Witch of the Waste. It was as if Sophie had always known this. But she had thought it was not proper to have a magic gift because she was the eldest of three. Lettie had been far more sensible about such things.”

″‘But you should have told me where you were, love!’ Sophie knew she should have. She had taken Martha’s view of Fanny, whole and entire, when she should have known Fanny better. She was ashamed.”

“You deny them hope. Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart. You won’t find that in the Constitution, I picked that up in church somewhere. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

″Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?”

“The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.”

“‘Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!’ returned Duncan, at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been engrafted in his nature.”

“Twould have been a cruel and an unhuman act for a white-skin; but ‘tis the gift and natur’ of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied.”

“I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white.”

“What they were seeing was black.”

″‘And I tell you that he who is born a Mingo will die a Mingo,’ returned the other, positively. ‘A Mohawk! No give me a Delaware...‘”

“Do you have a different name for killing when you wear a uniform to do it?”

“Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.”

“Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of a different race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”

“I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all.”

“I have been living in this country nine years longer than you have. Do you realize that? Yet I am prevented by law from becoming a citizen. I am prevented by law from owning land. I am now separated from my family without cause.”

“The band teacher knew I had more experience than anyone else competing that year . . . But he was afraid to use me. He had to go speak to the board about it, and to some of the parents, to see if it was allowable for an Oriental to represent the high school in such a visible way.”

“I couldn’t understand why he was home all day, when Mama had to go out working. I was ashamed of him for that and, in a deeper way, for being what had led to our imprisonment, that is, for being so unalterably Japanese.”

“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

“Thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients.”

“You know, my whole life changed after I fell in love. It was like the sun started shining on me for the first time, and for the first time in my life I began to smile. I was loved, I was loved, and I didn’t care what anyone thought. I wasn’t worried about getting caught, but I did notice that Peter’s friends were terrified of me; they stayed clear anytime I came near them. They’d walk away from me if they saw me walking down the road coming toward them, and if they came into the store, they wouldn’t even look at me. That started to worry me a little but I didn’t worry much.”

“She wipes her memory instantly and with purpose; it’s a way of preserving herself.”

“You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”

“Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other [country]. ”

“The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.”

“Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

“Nurse: Yes, now (Medea) knows at a terrible first hand what it is to miss one’s native land.”

“Jason: So…this is not the first time I have seen irrevocable damage done by a barbarous rage.”

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”

“Medea: Because I have a little knowledge, some are filled with jealousy, others think me secretive, and crazy. ”

“We cannot merely pray to You, O God, To root out prejudice, For You have already given us eyes With which to see the good in all men If we would only use them rightly.”

“The Syrians and Lebanese are called ‘those foreigners’ even though most of them have acquired Antiguan citizenship.”

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

Meggie’s smile wavered only slightly. She looked out across the vast lawn at Callum and Sephy. Her son and her employer’s daughter. They were good friends playing together. Real good friends. No barriers. No boundaries. Not yet anyway. It was a typical early summer’s day, light and bright and, in the Hadley household anyway, not a cloud in their sky.”

“Callum was the one person in the world I could tell anything and everything to without having to think twice about it. So why did I now feel so...out of step? Like he was leaving me behind? He suddenly seemed so much older, not just in years but in the things he knew and had experienced. His eyes were a lot older than fifteen.”

“I sat down at my place around the table y looked away from Mum. Dad wasn’t bothered about me -or anything else, for that matter. He was totally focused on his food. Jude, my seventeen-year-old brother, grinned knowingly at me. He’s a really irritating toad. I looked away from him as well. ‘He was with his dagger friend’ Jude smirked. ”

“Was she afraid of? Meggie sighed. No matter how hard she tried. Sarah insisted on keeping her distance. Meggie turned back to watch the children. Life was so simple for them. Their biggest worry was what they’d get for their birthdays. Their biggest grumble was the time they had to go to be. Maybe things would be different for them...”

“Callum is a Naught, a second class citizen in a society run by the ruling Crosses. Sephy is a Cross, and daughter of the man stated to become primer minister. In their world, white Naughts and black Crosses simple don’t mix -and certainly don’t fall in love.”

“The Second World War is raging. Times are very hard in Poland, especially for Jews, and Alex is one of them. His mother has disappeared and his father is “selected” by the German army for an unknown destination. Alone, Alex is forced to take refuge in an abandoned building at 78 Bird Street. Here he hopes to wait out the harsh winter and the promised return of his father.”

“But it is a gross injustice that my gala should suffer because the lower class falls ill.”

“Chin-Kee, my cousin. He’s been visiting me once a year since the eighth grade. He comes for a week or two and follows me to school, talking his stupid talk and eating his stupid food. Embarrassing the crap out of me. By the time he leaves, no one things of me as Danny anymore. I’m Chin-Kee’s cousin.”

“Boys scattered around the hills never would play with Ben. They said it was because he was so little and nervous. But M.C. had played with Ben from the time he was a child and didn’t know better. When he was older, he had been told. Now he guessed Ben was like a bad habit he couldn’t break and had to keep secret.”

The hardships that these families face, the prejudices against them, and the overall hate that some individuals have for immigrants are all topics highlighted in the text.

“DON’T BUY FROM JEWS!”

″‘What a hideous colour khaki is,’ remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopædic prejudices of her caste.”

″‘My word,’ said Lenina, ‘I’m glad I’m not a Gamma.‘”

“He thought me too poor to wed his sister,” answered Heathcliff, “and was grieved that I got her: his pride was hurt, and he’ll never forgive it.”

“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.”

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

“Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudices have been rooted up and turned into ridicule....”