Ingrid Betancourt Quotes

I try not to name too many labels - not because it's not cool, but because it starts getting political.

My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.

I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.

This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.

When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

I learned to think about religion, race and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes.

I would rather have a saloon on every corner than a catholic in the White House

We all judge people.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

I wanted to explore expectations we have of people - what a woman should be, what a man should be. And if they don't meet our own interpretation of who they should be because of their gender, their background, their ethnic group, we then come to conclusions about them that are not accurate.

Men of this world all rejoice in others being like themselves, and object to others not being like themselves.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

All prejudices are equally fatal to good government.

There's more to a person than whether or not they like dogs.

When people think what is the most simple sort of human, it's a white man, and anything else that is added to that complicates it for people. It comes with all kinds of meanings and connotations. If they have a different skin color, that comes with a connotation. If they're a woman, 'Oh well, what do I feel about that?'

I could be completely mad and sound like David Icke, but I just find people with blue eyes colder, less passionate, and more calculated people.

Prejudice is not just a personal sentiment - it can be institutional too.

My last name is good and bad. It's great from an opportunity standpoint. The bad news is that you're prejudged often.

Making sweeping over-generalizations is classically un-American.

I assume everyone is going to hate my music before listening to it or hate me before meeting me because of where I come from and my name - it's not Smith or Taylor.

[Donald Trump] went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.

Conservatism in general is bad, and it's racist and sexist.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

The Jew is an inborn Communist.