Ken Kesey Quotes

Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn't view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.

The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn't matter.

People who don't fit the mold are treated differently than those who do.

The magnitude of discrimination and stigma faced by people with disability in Australia cannot be underestimated. People do not understand disability, and people fear what they don't understand.

It's a really subtle kind of thing. It makes me feel like Randy Harrison is not a human being to them.

To single out a particular group and say we can't make a joke about them is almost a form of prejudice and it's kind of patronizing.

It never occurred to me that some people were seen as wrong or even different.

When you have a disability, people think you are weak. They think they can prey on you.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

Labels are actually not to make us understand things better: they are actually to ostracise and discriminate that what does not belong to the majority.

I always think that there's a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn't exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.

Asian males have not been appreciated for what they are. They have always been dissed for what they are not.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

all outcast peoples struggle to be recognized as individuals. The damage of oppression is that it robs you of your individuality. You're just a faggot. Or whatever - fill in the blank. Everything you do is seen through the prism of your gayness or your womanness or your blackness by some people.

You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty.

I think most gypsies all over the world are used to being not really welcome and always on the run, expecting people to not like them and to be critical.

It is not I who have been consigned to the bedroom of history.

Society is better off without certain people.

A week before shooting, they told me, You don't have the part, yet. We're still trying to find a handicapped kid who can act. Either that or we break your legs.

I think putting labels on people is just an easy way of marketing something you don't understand.

People always want to think that because you're not from a certain circumstance, you can't relate. That's ridiculous.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody's ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the 'n' word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren't pretty or they weren't rich or they weren't clever.