Ethnic Identity Quotes

#1. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement. #Quote by Wynton Marsalis

#2. But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" And God said, "I will be with you." (Exodus 3:10-12). Moses is asking about his identity when he asks God: "Who am I?" In effect, he is saying, "Are you sending me back to the Pharaoh as an Egyptian prince, as a Jewish slave or as a Midianite shepherd?" This would have huge implications for the words he would use and the approach he woudl take in confronting Pharoah. What is intriguing to me is God never gives him an answer. He simply tells Moses to go and that his presence will be with Moses. God is affirming Moses' triculturalism: "I have created you the way you are, Moses. You are the person that I need for this task right now. Go and I will give you all that you need to accomplish what I have set before you."

God uses us where we are, in all our complexity and confusion, especially in our ethnic identity, and does great and wonderful things through us. #Quote by Orlando Crespo

#3. It is important to remember that the Pacific Ocean covers a quarter of the world's surface and that each Pacific country has its own cultural, historical and ethnic identity. #Quote by Jenny Shipley

#4. Fortune cookies are an American invention, and we gave it to them. The Chinese were probably like, "Uh, we don't want it." And we were like, "It's now part of your ethnic identity. #Quote by Jim Gaffigan

#5. If you're paid before you walk on the court, what's the point in playing as if your life depended on it? #Quote by Arthur Ashe

#6. Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#7. The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression - rather [ ... ] it responds with 'benign neglect' [ ... ] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties. #Quote by Will Kymlicka

#8. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute. #Quote by Desmond Tutu

#9. Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation. #Quote by Ward Connerly

#10. Have you ever considered that some of the things we're proudest of, such as our nationality, religion, or ethnic identity, are also the foundations of our worst problems? #Quote by Joan Marques

#11. My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity. #Quote by Arthur Ashe

#12. I was confident about America and the idea that in America people can become American without masking their ethnic identity. #Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

#13. [I]t is something that comes up as a struggle in me. It especially came up when I was about 16 or 17. In high school people think you have to be so macho. People get attacked just because someone insinuates something about their sexuality. I think that's gruesome. #Quote by Green Day

#14. I am myself when I get up, I am myself throughout the day and I am myself when I go back to sleep, you probably might have met someone else when I was asleep and claimed it to be changed me. #Quote by Pushpa Rana

#15. It's no wonder the Tory Party opposed identity cards, since so many of them struggle to find an identity at all. #Quote by Rory Bremner

#16. Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words
"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"
words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way? #Quote by Jennifer Egan

#17. Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change. #Quote by Marshall McLuhan

#18. Why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody's dazzling language - or at least I hope that's not our reason. I think that most of us read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. #Quote by Orson Scott Card

#19. In our modern society the image and mythic process has been taken over by corporations that directly control advertising and, indirectly, the entertainment industry. Powerful erotic images are used for the sole purpose of selling consumer products; the side effects of this commercialization have a profound impact on the sexual imagination and identity of vast numbers of people. #Quote by Robert Lawlor

#20. The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. #Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

#21. If you're looking for your own idea of your own identity you know the human genome may not be the best place to look for it. You're just looking at a bunch of viruses. #Quote by Carl Zimmer

#22. If Turkey become a member of the EU, of course Turks would lose a part of this identity, just as Europe would lose a part of its own. It would also be a different Europe then. Accepting Turkey into the EU is an ambitious political endeavor of historical proportions. Europe would become a strong, multi-religious unit. #Quote by Orhan Pamuk

#23. It [9/11 tragedy] has affected us on so many levels: economically, morally, spiritually, ethically. It's been all over the place. A new American identity emerged - we now live in a very different America. This is the power of the definitive event. #Quote by Porochista Khakpour

#24. Taste, like identity, has value only when there are differences, #Quote by Carlo Petrini

#25. Identify your life mission and gift #Quote by Sunday Adelaja

#26. Every man has a need to be great at something #Quote by Sunday Adelaja

#27. Practical! On Wednesday afternoons I could be practically anything. What's up? #Quote by Kit Williams

#28. For a certain type of woman who risks losing her identity in a man, there are all those questions ... until you get to the point and know that you really are living a love story. #Quote by Anouk Aimee

#29. Splitting is the answer to the question, "How could White people consider themselves Christian while engaging in the daily horrors of slavery, especially when those horrors were targeted toward their supposed brothers and sisters in Christ?" Essentially, White Christians learned to separate their personal ethics from their social ethics. In order to preserve their self-images as good people, they had to minimize, repress, and deny their sinfulness - their active participation in racial oppression or silent complicity with it. Further, they had to create theologies and ecclesiologies that supported this minimization, repression, and denial. Thus, Christian identity became a matter of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy. In other words, believing in God and feeling good about one's personal relationship with God became more critical in defining Christian identity than did acting in a manner consistent with Christian social ethics. #Quote by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

#30. Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein's memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author's journey to reclaim - and celebrate - that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying. #Quote by Mira Bartok

#31. Trauma silences a person. It shatters your identity, and along with it, much of what you thought you knew. #Quote by Sandra Lee Dennis

#32. Charlie Hebdo has been sued a good dozen times by the General Alliance against Racism and for Respect of French and Christian Identity (AGRIF), an organization of Catholic fundamentalists who long maintained close ties with the National Front. #Quote by Charb

#33. Until you have answered the question "Who am I" you will not be capable of living your own life #Quote by Sunday Adelaja

#34. If a harmonious relationship is established amongst societies and religious beliefs in today's multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural world, then it will surely set a very good example for others. #Quote by Dalai Lama

#35. Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group. #Quote by Clay Shirky

#36. This is why I like Diakopoulos' approach of using technology to answer a need. He identifies four news consumers needs: 1. staying informed; 2. gaining personal identity (through, for example, reinforcing one's values); 3. integrating and interacting socially (finding the basis for conversation); and 4. being entertained. He next defines 10 key journalistic functions: 1. truth 2. independence 3. impartiality 4. public interest 5. watchdogging 6. organizing forums 7. informing 8. storytelling 9. aggregating 10. sensemaking #Quote by Jeff Jarvis

#37. I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege. #Quote by Leslie Feinberg

#38. When we find our identity anywhere other than Christ, our churches will be made up of warring partisans rather than loving siblings. #Quote by Russell D. Moore

#39. If I thought it was my identity to be a spiritual teacher, that would be a delusion. It's not an identity. It's simply a function in this world. #Quote by Eckhart Tolle

#40. The 1948 war's diplomatic maneuvers and military campaigns are well engraved in Israeli Jewish historiography. What is missing is the chapter on the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Jews in 1948. As a result of that campaign, five hundred Palestinian villages and eleven urban neighborhoods were destroyed, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were expelled, and several thousand were massacred.2 Even today, it is hard to find a succinct summary of the planning, execution, and repercussions of these tragic results. #Quote by Noam Chomsky

#41. I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.

When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.

But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva. #Quote by Antal Szerb

#42. We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real ... and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295) #Quote by Thomas Merton

#43. Hearing God's voice is not about something we do. Rather, hearing God is about someone we are. Hearing God is not primarily a behavior. It's a reflection of our identity. We hear God because of who we are and because of whose we are. In #Quote by Robert Morris

#44. For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not - Heaven help us _ all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone...Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. But it is not altogether plain sailing either...these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own...so that one will only come if it is raining....another if you can promise it a glass of wine - and so on... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#45. Our emotional valence – positive or negative experiences – affects not only how we narrate childhood events, but also which memories we retain. The interplay between a person encountering environment experiences meshed with self-editing of various aspects of their complex memory system results in a person becoming more than a collection of memories: a person creates their personalized version of a self. A person integrates many experiences into creating their being. Personal encounters with other people as well as moments of personal solitude contemplating ideas and personal existence congeal to form the depiction of a self. #Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

#46. While the Bible has nothing to say about how ethnic distinctions came to be, it does have definitive statements about how we are to regard them: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28). #Quote by John H. Walton

#47. It is said that when Martin Luther would slip into one of his darker places (which happened a lot, the dude was totally bipolar), he would comfort himself by saying, "Martin, be calm, you are baptized." I suspect his comfort came not from recalling the moment of baptism itself, or in relying on baptism as a sort of magic charm, but in remembering what his baptism signified: his identity as a beloved child of God. #Quote by Rachel Held Evans

#48. Avoid contradiction. Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge. #Quote by Marty Sklar

#49. To fall down is to face the weakness of my humanity, test the mettle of my character, and push the limits of my strength. Therefore, falling down will tell me who I am far more clearly than most things I might learn when I'm standing up. #Quote by Craig D. Lounsbrough

#50. It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were. #Quote by Alain De Botton

#51. I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father. #Quote by Michael Douglas

#52. It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. "You must be Dr. van der Kolk," she said. "My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?" I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting "Jane" and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment. #Quote by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#53. Individual, traditional method entrenched oligarchy so maintain own power: Fracture citizen isolated into different religion, different race, different family. Label as rich culture diversity. Cleave as unique until each citizen stand alone. Until each vote invested no value. Single citizen celebrated as special
in actual, remaining no power. Only when wedded to state purpose grants the citizen actual power. State mission and plan creates helpless individual as noble identity with grand reason for exist. #Quote by Chuck Palahniuk

#54. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution. #Quote by Andrew Solomon

#55. Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands. #Quote by Elisabeth Badinter

#56. This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products #Quote by Larry McCaffrey

#57. Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts. #Quote by Joshua Ferris

#58. When we do not know our true identity as powerful creators, we are susceptible to being used and manipulated. #Quote by Bryant McGill

#59. Mother
***
My mother is the world of my entity;

M - Memories of life that let me feel real love
O - Obstinate to all difficulties for care
T - Teachings that built my present and future
H - Heart touching warmth, devotion, and kisses
E - Energy, spirit, and worldly heaven of my life
R - Refuge, rectitude, and replenish in every way

My living heaven, after death, heaven,
my mother is my identity. #Quote by Ehsan Sehgal

#60. There's no linear narrative - the structure is more like a series of variations on a theme (how identity is shaped by language), with the past constantly bleeding into the present, dreams into reality. And the language, while incredibly lyrical in places, also has this underlying dissonance, the sense of it having itself been translated. #Quote by Deborah Smith