Shakuntala Devi Quotes

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Travel teaches tolerance.

Travel is the only way to get empathy for other people's mindsets - to know their struggles and what they're drawn to.

I really care about people, and I would need someone to also genuinely value other human beings and want to be connected with people in the world and to know about other cultures. That might not be a high standard for someone else, but for me, it's really important to try and stick to that.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man.

I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.

Everybody should leave their country at some point and visit others because you realize we're all people who need a chance to know about each other. That would benefit everyone.

Travel is lethal to prejudice.

LA can be a very open and accepting creative environment. But it is important, because there is this odd separation here, it is important to make your kids mindful of other people and other people's plight.

We must develop a deeper interest and greater understanding of the people we meet here or abroad. Like us, they are passengers on board that mysterious ship called life.

People don't hassle me. It's always very friendly anywhere in the world.

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

Now it is evident that a little insight into the customs of every people is necessary to insure a kindly communication; this, joined with patience and kindness, will seldom fail with the natives of the interior.

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it.

I want to be part of the storytelling that educates people and awakens a sense of compassion in other people of the kind of people they don't encounter in their daily lives very frequently.

After September 11, 2001, I was feeling like I really wanted more understanding between cultures. It seemed to me that so much of what happened on September 11 was because people didn't understand each other and were suspicious of each other.

As an actor, you come in contact with so many different people and cultures. It makes you a more accepting person.

We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.

Kindliness and sympathy, fellowship and understanding, are always good, but best when they come from a distant corner of the world.

Believing in each culture's right to be understood by the other party without any form of falseness or distortion is paramount.

The people with the passports, the people who travel more, tend to be the most understanding. And it's ironic that the people who travel the least have the strongest opinions about the people they've never met.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

It's hard to be judgmental once you've been around the world... it's pretty hard to be anything but understanding, and I think it's good for everybody to get out and see someplace other than where you grew up.