Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I think it is absurd to give such tremendous importance to the distinctions between men and women. When I meet someone I regard that person as a human being. I do not say "This is a man; this is a woman."

I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and this is everybody's wish.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to be like each other.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

When untouchability is rooted out, these distinctions will vanish and no one will consider himself superior to any other.

and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

This hetero - normative behavior and herd mentality is dangerous. It's okay to be different.

Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

Labels are for cans, not for people.

All isolation is wrong so say the herd. And long didst thou belong to the herd.

Nakedness makes us democratic, adornment makes us individuals.

People huddle together in doctrinaire herds, and the same jackasses who, without the slightest risk, now scream against racism are the same conformist personality types who would have carried torches in lynch mobs a century ago.

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

God cannot be so cruel and unjust as to make the distinctions of high and low between man and man, and woman and woman.

Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.

People have such a distinctive look to them these days. Whatever image they're doing, a lot of the time it sums up their character a bit. There are not many individual people anymore - they dress the same as their friends. It's a bit weird; everybody is trying to be different, but then they're exactly the same as whatever mob they hang out with.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

I don't get this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.

We always have to choose to live our lives to the fullest. No one is better or worse than anyone else. We are different and beautiful.

There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait.

Must one dread what others dread?