Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes

I think Cruella is evil, because she's the devil. But all the other characters, I was able to find a common humanity with them somewhere, knowing where they're most fragile, where they're most vulnerable, knowing some of the things that happened to them that might have formed this kind of behavior.

Remember that we are all human beings trying to do what we love to do.

Americans don't learn about the world; they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography.

The bottom line is people are people, and the sooner we realise that, the better off things are going to be.

Not everybody gets a chance to go fly around the country and spend time in places with people who aren't like them, where, again and again, you realize we're all generally alike.

There's a lot of people in this world, and it's important to learn about them.

It's just about feelings. And the thing is we - everybody lives exactly the same things. We are all humans, even if you speak Spanish or whatever you speak. That's just - we are humans, and that's really interesting. And I'm sure that we can understand each other even if you don't understand my language.

As an anthropologist, I believe strongly in our common humanity. We can rise above the tribal divisions that have caused so much anguish and real damage in the past.

We're all people at the end of the day.

We must create a climate where people agree that human beings are more alike than unalike. The only way to do that is through education.

Your enemies are people too, and maybe they don't have to be enemies if they're that much like you.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven’t time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else’s story, we come to understand our own.

Our common humanity is more important than all the things that divide us.

We're all human beings. And we all have our prejudices and so forth, but the thing is, let's be tolerant with each other. And if we could do that, there would be a lot more peace in our world today.

I think our music is more about seeing ourselves in each other and trying to find a more humanistic viewpoint for the world.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

The world only makes sense to me given my life and my background if, in fact, we're not just an assortment of tribes that can never understand each other, but that we're, rather, one common humanity that can meet and learn and love each other.

One of the many lessons I hope I've learned is how much I underestimated people, their open-mindedness and their willingness to understand. I think, moreover, I underestimated the degree to which everyone has a story. So my advice, for whatever it's worth, is to trust readers, trust the truth and trust the power of storytelling.

We will only begin to forgive when we can look upon the wrongdoers as ourselves, neither better nor worse. We need to remember that we coexist as mortals in the world, together, the wronged and the wrongdoer, and that, in our common humanity, the situation could readily be reversed.

The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby?

We look into each other's eyes as we shake. His are still full of death and horror, but in them I see my face reflected, and inside my tiny eyes inside his, I think I see some hope.

You know what I want to think of myself? As a human being. Because, I mean I don't want to be like "As Confucius say," but under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family. It just so happens man that people are different.

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.