Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of man considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

You cannot take one set of issues from one country and apply it to another. They are all different, in terms of history, and the religious compositions of the populations involved.

You need to figure out other societies, where they came from, what the people believe in, what they do, how their ethnic divisions work, which is often very different from our own; then design your policies around that. Pay attention. I think that's the simple answer, which is just to realize that not everybody is like the United States. Whether you study history or sociology, or anthropology, journalism, there's room for seeing there are other cultures and other ways and other structures.

The structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mold the social life of mankind.

Fashion is an expression of a time, of a place, of history. It's putting things into context.

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

I'm not a representative of Pakistan; I'm just an example that Pakistanis are different from each other. I believe it in my fiction and I believe it personally.

From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

On the other hand, ethnic psychology must always come to the assistance of individual psychology, when the developmental forms of the complex mental processes are in question.

Nations, like individuals, are largely the product of their environment; and many of their characteristics, their fears and their neuroses, as well as their abilities, are conditioned by the impressions of what we may call their early childhood.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

Whenever Americans are free to select their own associates they almost always select associates of their own race.

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

There is no social question, there are social questions.