Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.

I've been lucky-my looks haven't put me into one category. I don't look like a blue blood. I don't look like a criminal. I don't look like anything.

Labels are for cans, not people.

People see me as Andre first. Then they see me as someone who happens to be a Muslim.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

Any society where it's a crime or a hassle to be different is a society based on psychological fascism.

I was just trying to say that it's unnecessary; you don't need to label yourself. I guess it came off the wrong way, because then everyone labelled me as gay. That's not what I was trying to say. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!

Everyone in the world, regardless if they're Muslim or not, does not have to adhere to the label society slaps on you.

The awful lesson of history is that we too often ignore people, just because they're foreigners or different from us.

Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.

Our essential differences from the norm are both huge and deeply offensive to those among us who wish to be quietly integrated into society without particular reference to our nature.

I am Chinese - it doesn't matter what other people say.

It is no longer acceptable in British politics to be fat or eccentric or religious.

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.

We have a lot of historical and religious baggage in our culture. It's ancient; we are clannish as a species. We like things to fit into boxes, and it's unfortunate because humans are unique and should be celebrated and embraced as such.

I don't think because I hang out with enough black people, I'm gonna turn black. What kind of rationalization is that? I'm just friends with people that I like. I don't care what skin color you are.

I've never bothered about my color. I never had that thing about being black. If the whole world was like that, maybe there would be more harmony and love. Maybe. I don't have a problem with being black in a white country or being with my people.

I didn't see how wearing prosthetics was quite so different from being born with flaming red hair in a crowd of black-haired babies, or being of a different religion from that of every other child in your area.

It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.

Of course we've been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West. That's the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes - waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain.

We're frightened of what makes us different.

I never felt any different from anyone else though.

I don't judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they're a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.

Once you label me you negate me.

I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.