Umberto Eco Quotes

Discrimination is alive and soaring.

If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?

The Jew is upset because the nations of the world - the United Nations - lash him, brand him as racist and evil, hate him and openly demonstrate their desire to destroy him.

Here, like everywhere else, laughing and singing, dancing and dreaming are not exactly the whole of reality; and for one ray of sun shining on the hut, the rest of the village remains in the dark.

Like one of any minority, I have experienced prejudice.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place.

The devastating repercussions of hate-filled language manifest in very real ways for today's LGBTQ youth.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

To single out a particular group and say we can't make a joke about them is almost a form of prejudice and it's kind of patronizing.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

The Muslim community here does feel under siege.

Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily.

It is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Those fighting to be included in the ideal of equality are not being divisive; those fighting to keep those people out are.

Discrimination is not a national defense strategy!

If you think about it, there's not a religious group, there's not a nationalistic group, there's not a tribe, there is no grouping of people to my knowledge, of any consequence, who have not, at one or another time, been the object of hatred, racism, or who has not had people against them just because they were them.

The 'X-Men' stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don't fit into normal society and are ostracised; it's a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation.