Shelby Steele Quotes

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I've never tried to measure myself on any scale. A person is more multifaceted than the label they often get stuck with. On the other hand someone's whole behaviour allows you to characterise them in a certain way. This person has liberal convictions, that person has conservative ones, this person is a radical socialist, and so on.

Keep your sense of self; don't get caught up in what people want you to be.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.

But I'm not worried about seeking out the approval of others - that high school thing of joining the club.

I've learned a lot about how people have to fight through their whole lives just to be themselves.

No, I do not identify with the right wing.

People are always judging you based on where you're from, where you went to school, how you look, how you talk. But at the end of the day, you're going to have to look into the mirror and accept who you are. It's all about being authentic.

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

Liberals believe they own the franchise on minorities and can't stand any Hispanic or black who breaks rank.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

I don't tend to warm too well to people that tell me how I'm supposed to think. So, my life in Hollywood - I'm afraid I was destined to be a Republican.

Make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You push for colour-blind casting; you draw your own box. You introduce yourself as who you are, not what colour your parents happen to be.

I think, a lot of times, that's why groups break-up, because people lose their individuality.

As a black person, I have two parties to choose from: liberal and conservative. If I choose to be a liberal - regardless of who I choose - I'm picking the lesser of two evils in my mind basically.

I don't want to be seen in a way where all I can do is what people expect of me.

I am so sick and tired of being told what I'm supposed to look like!

I don't want to be someone else.

I will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it.

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people’s expectations.

I never understood liberal Jews blaming Israel, you know, supporting Palestinians. I've never understood it, until I spoke once to a man named Norman Podhoretz, and he said to me, "Many of you refer to liberal Jews that way. They're not Jews. They are liberals. Liberalism is what is first and foremost in their identity. The fact that they are Jews is not paramount or prominent. It's secondary - and, in many cases, even tertiary - to their identity."

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.