Dylan Moran Quotes

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

The Armenians are a race like the Jews: they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character. Armenians and Greeks have many flaws and deficiencies of character that do not fit them for self government.

I'm Colombian. My family all have different complexions; some are people of color. I've been called every name by white people, been mocked for speaking in Spanish by white people.

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.

I grew up with the idea that someone might hate you if they knew what religion you were; being afraid to open my mouth because my accent might make people think something about me. Or even if they didn't, would they understand me?

My feeling is that the English are naturally anti-Semitic.

Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us.

I was teased about Indian food and the colour of my skin and why my knees and elbows were dark.

As an ethnic female in wrestling, there will be people reading my words and I want to set an example. I did experience racism.

I did not want people to know that I was a Muslim; I did not want people to know my name or that I did not have an American name. I did not want that. Because I knew if they knew that, they would cast me as the bad guy.

Making sweeping over-generalizations is classically un-American.

When you're walking down a street and you are a brown-skinned person or you're a person that lives in an immigrant community, there's no differentiating on - solely on the basis of what you look like. They don't walk down the street saying, hi, I'm an immigrant; I'm here legally or not.

I had kids make fun of me because not only was I blonde but also Polish.

We judge people based on their clothes, social class, and, dare I say, ethnicity. Our comedians make light of these stereotypes regularly, and we laugh at their accuracy.

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them?

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

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.

If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it's late at night, I'm walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there's a guy that has tattoos all over his face, white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere, I'm walking back to the other side of the street, and the list goes on of stereotypes that we all live up to and are fearful of.

With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.

There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.

I've got another friend who is half-German and half-Polish. He hates Jews but can't remember why!

Don't let the actions of a few determine the way you feel about an entire group. Remember, not all German's were Nazis.