The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
The pursuit of otherness, the sense that we are somehow different than our brothers and sisters, no matter where we find them, allows for all the other great evils: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against gay people and against women.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes that the feeling of being different from others leads to various societal evils.
Anna Quindlen highlights how the human tendency to perceive ourselves as separate or different from others fosters a culture of discrimination and violence. This 'otherness' is a root cause for many societal issues, including racism, sexism, and homophobia, as it promotes a lack of empathy and understanding among individuals.
Themes
OthernessDiscriminationEmpathySocietyDivision
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on equality, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of unity.
More from Anna Quindlen
All quotes →The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Anna QuindlenRead
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna QuindlenRead
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Anna QuindlenRead
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Anna QuindlenRead
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna QuindlenRead
Similar quotes
The Christian world is in a deep sleep; nothing but a loud shout can awaken them out of it!
George WhitefieldRead
Knowledge comes through likeness. And so because the soul may know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original idea, in which all things are one. And there it comes to rest in God.
Meister EckhartRead
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand RussellRead
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," Pulitzer wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
Joseph PulitzerRead
If the government is to try and ban private consumption of alcohol and tobacco, it must surely ban such activities as hang-gliding, skiing, rock-climbing and so on. Where should it stop? Rugby? American Football? Ice Hockey? _x000D_ Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.
Milton FriedmanRead
if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead