Tamora Pierce Quotes

I want the white people to understand my people.

I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.

Racism has a very quick expiration date when exposed to actual contact with people.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

Imagine Americans who go to Paris. Why would you want to go where someone's going to disparage you? Why would you go anywhere where they treat you bad? Well, that's how it is for us to go to Mexico. You have to be on your guard, because I think the Mexicans are harder on the Mexicans, the Mexican-Americans. They don't see us as Mexican. I think part of it's a class issue and a color issue. We're more connected to their servants, so what are we doing staying at a nice hotel? There's a kind of shame.

We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make.

The heart never knows the colour of the skin

If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.

Acknowledged differences may create mutual respect, but hazy misunderstandings bring forth nothing but prejudice and rejection.

I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.

I don't think religious profiling or ethnic profiling is permissible, period. That is using religion or ethnicity as a proxy for suspicion. It just doesn't make any sense.

I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me.

If I want people to be empathetic to my struggle - they don't see hate crimes at the mosque, they don't see people screaming at their cousins, brothers, or sisters who wear a hijab to "go back to your country" - I have to do the same.

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance

Wisdom subdues bigotry.

Respecting differences is very difficult.

I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."

It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.

One thing I do know, you can't change hatred by showing those people that they're wrong about us.

sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.