Victoria Coren Mitchell Quotes

What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.

For too long, actually, we have either said you're this or that.

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.

In movies we tend make things black and white: you're either this, or you're that.

I think putting labels on people is just an easy way of marketing something you don't understand.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

I think people have a strong desire to push me and others into some sort of political box that they can wrap their minds around.

They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two.

I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in.

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.

Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don't have to do the hard work of figuring out who's who.

It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.

I hate bumper stickers, you can't sum anything up. All you do is paint yourself in some caricaturist corner.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

The will to label will always prevail over what's being labeled, usually at the expense of either truth or understanding.

People like to pigeonhole you. It's easier.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

People tend to simplify things.

Crazy people are my people? Really? I think that's silly. That's another one of those pigeonhole things. Lay somebody on an ironing board and put a scalding hot iron on them, get that going real good: 'Oh, this is who Holly Hunter is.'

If the internet has taught me anything it is that people are either heroes or they belong in the bin.

I'm not the only one that people try to put in a box. I think it's easier for people to understand things when they can categorize them.

To call someone anti-American, indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good, you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.