This file is about Tolerance and Prejudice. Also see Attitude.
- At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being. (Friedrich Otto Hertz)
- The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance. (Benjamin Disraeli)
- Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. (Shirley MacLaine)
- Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature. (George Bernard Shaw)
- A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. (William James)
- Have You Gone to Jail for Justice? (song by Anne Feeney)
- The highest result of education is tolerance. (Helen Keller)
- I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me.
- In each of us there is a little of all of us. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
- Intolerance is the most socially acceptable form of egotism, for it permits us to assume superiority without personal boasting. (Sidney J. Harris)
- It is never too late to give up your prejudices. (Henry David Thoreau)
- It were not best that we all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races. (Mark Twain)
- Jim Bakker spells his name with two k's because three would be too obvious. (Bill Maher)
- Judgement and fear makes strangers out of people who should be friends.(Cameron Koo)
- Keep That Dream (song by Heidi Muller)
- Many a Mile to Freedom (song by Joan Baez)
- The only thing that should be separated by color is laundry.
- Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone's lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don't have to compromise convictions to be compassionate. (Rick Warren)
- Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life.
- People only see what they are prepared to see. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- Prejudice is the child of ignorance. (William Hazlitt)
- Prejudice is a great time-saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
- Prejudice not being founded on reason cannot be removed by argument. (Samuel Johnson)
- Prejudice squints when it looks and lies when it talks. (Duchess Abrantes)
- Prejudices are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. (Charlotte Bronte)
- Prejudices are what fools use for reason. (Voltaire)
- Racism is man's gravest threat to man -- the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason. (Abraham Joshua Heschel)
- Reasoning against prejudice is like fighting against a shadow; it exhausts the reasoner, without visibly affecting the prejudice. (Mildmay)
- Respect is appreciation of the separateness of the other person, of the ways in which he or she is unique. (Annie Gottleib)
- Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. (Elie Wiesel, during acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize)
- There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. (Edmund Burke)
- Tolerance and celebration of individual differences is the fire that fuels lasting love. (Tom Hannah)
- Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. (Joshua Liebman)
- Too many of our prejudices are like pyramids upside down. They rest on tiny, trivial incidents, but they spread upward and outward until they fill our minds. (William McChesney Martin)
- Too often we seek justice for just us.
- We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. (Anais Nin)
- We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. (Jonathan Swift)
- We need to better respect and value differences. Too many people go through life thinking everyone else has the same style they do but the others are 'defective'. (Larry E. Senn)
- You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. (Anne Lamott)
- You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place. (Jonathan Swift)
Martin Luther King, Jr. on Religion
A religion true to its natures must also be concerned about man's social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.
Speak Up Before it's Too Late
In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me...By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.
Diversity...is not polite accommodation. Instead, diversity is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind, have as much integrity of being, as much claim on the world as you do. And I urge you, amid all the differences present to the eye and mind, to reach out to create the bond that will protect us all. We are meant to be here together.
The Cold Within
(James Patrick Kinney)
Six humans trapped by happenstance
In black and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story's told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first woman held hers back
For on the faces around the fire
She noticed one was black.
The next man looking cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store.
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy poor.
The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
And the last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.
The logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.
(Ethel Blair Jordan)
I thought that foreign children
Lived far across the sea
Until I got a letter
From a boy in Italy.
"Dear little foreign friend," it said
As plainly as could be.
Now I wonder which is "foreign",
The other child or me.
(© 2010 Bob Atkinson, used with permission)
roll on the hills endlessly
grass upon them on which to feed
the docile beast head down to nip
at flavored bundles growing up
sound playing from the wind
strange noises almost from within
the body's sharp and deepest points
the animal seems alert, a horse
ready to run toward or from harm
from such a gentle form
the man comes to sit upon
the wild and willing creature
his every curve a useful feature
painted marks around his coat
showing off a warrior's pride
a knife, a hand, a shield and arrows long
a bow with which to shoot them far
not his first battle to be won
his confidence is strong
he knows his skills are good as any
his nerve has yet to fail him
east toward the sunrise,
a slow pace plodding
the two are one in quiet purpose
they join with others for the fight
in the ceremony of an honored life
or simply death forever
his mind today stands still
no past, no future no desire to fall
or not to fall, it is determined
by the spirits, not his movements
a show of bravery
strength and cunning
on his wild horse running
is all he can give until he dies
on the day his mother cries
arrows aimed right at the heart
lances thrown hard to impale
knives wielded on the ground
dying, wounded laying down
upon the bundles of gentle grasses
wild plants that had been growing
seeded by the winds of nature
the warrior seems quiet now
his eyes open, viewing azure sky
his thoughts that he had done his best
to insure that his and only his
live to see another day
his life has but a moment left
but, he is now content
to die a hero in his mind
the enemy others were
of course, not of his kind
As Others See Us
There were the Scots
Who kept the Sabbath
And everything else
they could lay there hands on.
Then there were the Welsh
Who prayed on their knees
and their neighbors.
Thirdly there were the Irish
who never knew what they
wanted but were willing to
fight for it anyway.
Lastly there were the English
Who considered themselves
a self made nation
Thus relieving the Almighty
of a dreadful responsibility.
(If you are Scottish, Irish, Welsh or English and are upset by this poem please look at the title. This poem is not about what the people are like but what they were sometimes perceived to be like by others.)