Prejudice Quotes

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
― Albert Einstein

“Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Love is too precious to be ashamed of.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, A Stroke of Midnight

“I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“If you are an alien, how come you sound like you're from the north?'

'Lots of planets have a north!”
― Russell T Davies

“Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it from existing for the rest of us.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
― Kofi Annan

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
― Blaise Pascal, De l'art de persuader

“Mental illness

People assume you aren’t sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you’re hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren’t ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won’t solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works.”
― Emm Roy, The First Step

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“Even god doesn't propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?”
― Dale Carnegie

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet.”
― Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

“I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.”
― Thurgood Marshall

“Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.”
― Emma Goldman

“You can't dwell on what might have been...and it's not fair to condemn him for something he hasn't done.”
― Wendelin Van Draanen, Flipped