Octavio Paz Quotes

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

People would write me hate letters. How dare I try to represent Hispanics when I was so white? I tried to make them see it was racism.

A child from the age of 2 or 3 absorbs what is in the environment and what generates hatred for anyone perceived to be different.

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

I think we have cultural bias and practice some ethnocentrism when it comes to ethnic food in America.

When people today say 'racism,' they mean it's a nationalism they don't like. Racialism used to be a good thing, a looking-out for what was best for one group... Israel comes out of that 19th-century idea of nationalism. Many Arab states also have preferences. It's fundamentally unfair to decide that one is racism and the others aren't.

I was teased about Indian food and the colour of my skin and why my knees and elbows were dark.

Making sweeping over-generalizations is classically un-American.

I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.

It's just amazing that there are so many prejudices even now.

It's not hard to look at our own world and draw parallels between 9/11, for example, and how Muslims are viewed or treated by North American culture since then. Just to see the way fear can breed hatred and intolerance for people who aren't the same as us - and that's certainly part of what's at the heart of 'Descender.'

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

You tend to be afraid when someone seems foreign to you. But if you aren't careful, that can lead to bigotry.

The image of Ireland is projected as a male image in the acting world, similar to the way that the word of Ireland is male dominated.