Parker Palmer Quotes

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

In every high school, there is a clique.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

No matter where you are in your life, whatever set of people you're with, it all still breaks down like high school does. You have your social cliques, you have the people you get along with, the people you don't and the people you're ambivalent about. All of the dynamics are still here.

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.

All this fashion stuff - who's cool now - is just a bigger version of the cool kids versus the nerds.

I went to a high school that didn't have many people in it. There were, like, 60 people in my senior class. There was a group of cool kids and a group of really dorky kids, and I was probably the coolest of the really dorky kids.

From middle school to the first year of high school, I went to a school in Miami that seemed like a private country club. The whole cheerleader, football player, clique-y thing there was terrifying. Those people were so scary. They're the scariest kinds of people because they are idolized by their peers.

Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.

Coming into high school, it's scary. You don't know which group to be in, and I can't stand that it's so cliquey.

In high school, there are so many cliques. You're never safe.

In Japan, more than in any other country I've ever been in, one is not supposed to write about the people in the glass bubble; that is why they are in the glass bubble.

What everyone knows" is the line between us and them.

High school is all about hierarchies, labels, cliques - we are labeled and structured. Everyone goes through it, more or less.

There's always going to be cliques - everywhere you go, there's gonna be cliques; there's gonna be people that gravitate towards each other.

I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I got really aggressive about it and became more of a weird kid.

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.

In every school I've gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.

When one English person speaks, another one immediately classifies him. No class system in the world is so audible, which is also why it is so pernicious and enduring.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

The Clique: The only thing harder then getting in is staying in.

Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.

I don't see anything wrong with a neighborhood association wanting to keep their neighborhood a certain way or their apartment complex a certain way. I don't see anything wrong with white kids wanting to go to school with white children, or black kids wanting to go to school with black kids.

We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.