Quotes on Who We Are

History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.

It's really impossible for athletes to grow up. On the one hand, you're still a child, still playing a game. But on the other hand, you're a superhuman hero that everyone dreams of being. No wonder we have such a hard time understanding who we are.

How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?

There are so many pressures that are put upon young women. Whatever we can do to alleviate that and help women feel beautiful about who we are inside, which is the only beauty there truly is, is so nice. Let's get down and dirty. Let's be a real girl.

Joy is our goal, our destiny. We cannot know who we are except in joy. Not knowing joy, we do not know ourselves.

As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity.

There will be no major solution to the suffering of humanity until we reach some understanding of who we are, what the purpose of creation was, what happens after death. Until those questions are resolved we are caught.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.

Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.

Everything that happens to us is a reflection of who we are.

I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.

Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it...and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love.

Women are always being tested ... but ultimately, each of us has to define who we are individually and then do the very best job we can to grow into it.

The act of discovering who we are will force us to accept that we can go further than we think.

This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

We usually know what we can do, but temptation shows us who we are.