Men mixing with women is like fire mixing with wood.
I think life is more interesting when everybody's jumbled up together. When people separate out into cliques and things, it's okay, but it's a bit limiting. You can always learn things from other people. This is my theory.
When Muslims live and grow up in a separate neighborhood in London, they are surrounded only by their culture. They don't need to integrate with other cultures, they don't need to mix with other people... When we don't live together, we start hating each other.
No matter how high a moral standard a community may attain, the introduction in that community of any considerable number of persons of a lower moral tone will cause a general moral deterioration just as sure as night follows a day. The intermarriage of a lower with a higher type certainly does not improve the latter any more than does the breeding of cattle by blooded and common stock improve the blooded stock generally.
I don't even think places like the National Youth Theatre (NYT) are necessarily about wanting to be an actor when you grow up. They're about meeting people from different backgrounds and different religions and different cultures, and mixing with people that you wouldn't ordinarily meet.
If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.
Of this diversion the Scots are so fond, that, when the weather will permit, you may see a multitude of all ranks, from the senator of justice to the lowest tradesman, mingled together, in their shirts, and following the balls with utmost eagerness.
I really love living in cities where the people living above, below and next to you are from totally different worlds to you.
I went to the States with that amount of prejudice which seems the birthright of every English person, but I found that, under the knowledge of the Americans which can be attained by a traveller mixing in society in every grade, these prejudices gradually melted away.
I believe in national service, I believe that every young adult citizen should do two years of national service. Not necessarily to be deployed, but to understand teamwork, responsibility and mixing with different people.
I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.
You can’t throw a park down and think everybody is going to mix and be happy and share picnic tables and sing songs together.
This ability to mix people together is something I learned early on.
Only the whites in the South aren't hypocritical about it. You don't find any more inter - there is just as much social intermixing in the South as there - between the races as there is in the North. Only they - in the South they let you know - where they stand, and in the North they take a hypocritical approach or attitude or reaction.
Our pop cultural likes and dislikes are still very segregated, and that is not true of 'Billy on the Street.'
I'm always looking for those places where you can slam really disparate people up against one another, and they have to deal with each other. There are very few crossroads anymore. We talk about this country as this big melting pot, but it's a mosaic. There's all these pieces, they're next to each other, they're not necessarily mixing. And I'm looking for those spaces where people actually do mix.
I think, again, that that does the whole problem a, a disservice. It's not a case of our wanting to mix socially with whites. And when you - and the whites are right in the South when they say that getting a cup of coffee in a restaurant is not going to solve - is all right.
But, once again, when I said I'm so grateful for my mom just being adamant about me staying in public school - that is what allowed me to be exposed to so many different types of people. I went to a high school that was by the beach. I elected to do bussing my junior high school years. And my first year of high school, I would take the bus from my neighborhood to the beach schools. And at those schools, you had such a mix of so many types of kids.
