Quotes on People

As African-Americans, people of that generation felt pretty much if they were going to see changes in the world, they had to make sacrifices and step up to the plate. I'm very proud that my parents happened to be people who did. They were not privileged to have a formal education.

The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school's steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn't have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.

Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.

People don't want to think... I mean, they don't! They just want to say, 'Oh, okay, feminists are humorless man-haters,' and that's simply not the case. There are radical people and radical ideas in absolutely every movement, but that doesn't mean they define the ideals.

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.

When you're under a microscope from an early age, you realize that people aren't always going to like you. And that's OK. And you're going to fail publicly, and that's OK, too.

Ninety percent of all people under 30 are in developing countries, and that means that this new access to tech, which is such a positive thing... is also a ticking time bomb of frustration... You get this clear mismatch of opportunity and expectation.

The problem is that the same technological tools we use to thwart terrorists can also be used against the people whose job it is to stop them.

I'd argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to 'Star Trek.' They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism, and other problems that have beset us.

We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you become really committed to winning and become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.

So many amongst us live in the past rather than loving the present and building a brilliant future. Some people stay stuck for years over something they did or a failure they've experienced. Sad. A life is a terrible thing to waste.

People make their own fates, and if enough of us make our fate to be space explorers, perhaps we can actually get some space exploration done.

No nude scenes. No sex-symbol parts. I want people to recognize me for my work, not just for being pretty.

We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.

The question that white people need to ask ourselves is not if we were shaped by the forces of racism, but how.

One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we've caused.

Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.

I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

The thing I always say to people is this: 'If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.'