Yoko Ono Quotes

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

It isn't easy to understand the lives of people different from your own.

No matter who you are, no matter what your culture is, it is absolutely possible to look out and extend yourself in such a way, that you can connect to other people and find that we are more alike than we are different.

I'm a citizen of the world. I like it that way. The world's a wonderful. I just think that some people are pretty badly represented. But when you speak to the people themselves they're delightful. They all want so little.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity.

I think it would be very scary and very confusing if I didn't understand where people are coming from, but I've felt the exact same way for so many other bands, growing up. It's not really a big deal.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

All this misjudgment that we have of each other is based on ignorance. The second you get to travel, you see that human beings, no matter where they come from, they are the same.

And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.

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.

Children of color need a mirror to see themselves in. And then people who don't have that experience, they need a window. They need a really personalized way to see what people who are different from them are going through.

As I got older, I started realizing that though people differ in skin tone, religious beliefs, cultures, and food, one thing we all have in common is emotions, so I tapped into emotions.

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.

When I meet a new person, I don’t see race or religion. I look deeper. We must learn to satisfy our conflicts peacefully and to respect one another.

I'm glad that the lyrics reach people and make them understand that we're all the same, really.

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.

It's hard to come up with a 'quote' about myself. Perhaps I could say that most of my writing has been concerned with understanding between people. Whether of different races, or religions, or even in the same family I tried in my books... to deal with the subject of understanding the other fellow.

There is in us all that line that prevents us from fully understanding those who are different.

When people have points of reference that are humanizing, that demystifies difference.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls, and through those holes we can get a glimpse of the other and sometimes even like what we see.

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.

You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you. But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew.