Clarence Thomas Quotes

Being in the space that I am as a writer, and just as a black dude in America, there's this push to be cool or be what you're expected to be. There's a need for a song that puts that in perspective. I think that's an important thing for young children to hear growing up.

Everybody sacrifices something in an attempt to reach what they think society wants.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

I didn't want to wear a checked shirt and grow a mustache - that's what you had to do, and everyone did.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

You don't have to be a certain thing to be cool. If you're white, you don't have to act black or whatever. Just be you and know who you are.

I have a fear of labels. If someone labels me, I have to respond - do I acknowledge it, reject it, deny it, live up to it, and defy it? Labels can affect your ability to be yourself. If you're not careful, like I wasn't when I was young, that can take a toll on you. You find yourself conforming to everyone else's ideas of who you are.

There are so many stereotypes of how you have to be as a black man, growing up in the community as a man.

I am so sick and tired of being told what I'm supposed to look like!

I'm not the standard Asian girl.

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

I think that you can only be true to yourself. Nobody can live up to other people's expectations. You will always let them down. There will always be something they won't like about you.

When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.

People can try to make me into anything they want, but I think they're really throwing around language but saying the same thing.

People tell me what to do every single day. They think I'm boring. I'm Disney kid. So, there's that.

Every ethnic group has this where people within it will try and tell each other how they should be. So what I would say to other people is to just embrace who you are because you will become instantly happier.

I don't see why we ever think of what others think of what we do – no matter who they are. Isn't it enough just to express yourself?

You don't have to fight against being placed in a box any more than the number two has to fight against being the number three. I mean, two is not going to be the number three, ever.

Don't change for nobody.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

I think pop culture underestimates people. The message is, 'Being yourself is the worst thing you could possibly be.' But people are still attracted to it.

I'm like, 'Yeah, I could afford braces, but why should I change myself to be what everybody else wants me to be when I'm OK with who I am and I'm happy with who I am?'