Diversity is about a variety of differences. Human diversity can refer to the fact of having a variety of views, traits, identities, cultures, races, colors, etc. represented, and it can also refer to the inclusion and valuing of that variety, especially related to social and cultural identities. Biodiversity is about the variety of life in a particular ecosystem.

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You are human only when the very title sends a galvanic wave of courage and conscience into the hearts of others. You are human only when any creature bearing that title becomes near and dear to you, no matter their faith, language and culture.

— Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.

— Abraham Lincoln

George is American, white, and from a wealthy, largely homogenous neighborhood of Long Island, New York. His accent is flat, his voice stable, he liked categories and frameworks. He liked order and linearity. Cause led to effect. Action led to reaction. When we argued, he often called my claims and conclusions groundless, illogical, and contradictory. That my ground was different– was less constant, was wilder– than his ground was not something he was willing or equipped to consider. He understood the world through analytic deduction. I leaned more heavily on a more corporeal form of knowing.

— Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one’s own way to the highest, to one’s own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one’s ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.

— Algernon Black

There are very practical reasons why multiracial movements are vital to building the world we deserve. Segregation by race and class has been used throughout history to maintain power relationships. Segregation, whether through redlining or denying citizenship, helps to create an other, which helps in turn to justify why some people have and other people don’t. It reinforces the narratives that make unequal power relationships normal.

— Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

— Anaïs Nin

Seek diverse authors, not just diverse books. If you want to truly decolonize your library seek more than a Black/Brown face on the cover of the book.

— Angela Shanté, The Noisy Classroom

The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has too often been a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power.

— Anna Garlin Spencer

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

— Anne Frank

Differences challenge assumptions.

— Anne Wilson Schaef

One man may hit the mark, another blunder; but heed not these distinctions. Only from the alliance of the one, working with and through the other, are great things born.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Beauty is strangely various. There is the beauty of light and joy and strength exulting; but there is also the beauty of shade, of sorrow and sadness, and of humility oppressed.

— Arnold Bennett

Any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve.

— Audre Lorde

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

— Audre Lorde

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

— Audre Lorde

Diversity is a condition necessary for life. Diversity creates the biological tensioning that makes life in general vigorous and sustainable. It’s diversity that ensures perpetuity. The loss of diversity, on the other hand, threatens all life with extinction.

— Barry H. Lopez

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching privilege to difference.

— bell hooks

Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

— bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

An inclusive world starts with each of us choosing to respect perspectives other than our own, treating everyone with respect and choosing to stand up for others who need our support. More than anything else, this is what going beyond diversity truly means.

— Beyond Diversity, Rohit Bhargava

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.

— Bible, Ecclesiastes

We are all different, which is great because we are all unique. Without diversity, life would be very boring.

— Catherine Pulsifer

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

— Charles Evan Hughes

To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.

— Cornelia Otis Skinner

There is a real problem with the lack of diversity, specifically in genre films and the superheroes our kids grow up watching and emulating, they can’t really identify with. When you see the same thing, over and over again, and it seems not to speak of you and your heritage and your culture, it leaves you out of this world, a little bit. It gives a certain social distance with your world.

— Djimon Hounsou

Autumn teaches us a valuable lesson. During summer, all the green trees are beautiful. But there is no time of the year when the trees are more beautiful than when they are different colors. Diversity adds beauty to our world.

— Donald L. Hicks

I was motivated to be different in part, because I was different.

— Donna Brazile

One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.

— Douglas Tallamy

The United States is regarded by people everywhere as a dream come true, a sort of world state in miniature. Here dwell the world’s emigrants under one law, and the law is: Thou shalt not push thy neighbor around. By some curious divinity which in him lies, Man, in this experiment of mixed races and mixed creeds, has turned out more good than bad, more right than wrong, more kind than cruel, and more sinned against than sinning. This is the world’s hope and its chance.

— E.B. White, The Wild Flag: Editorials from the New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters (published 1943-1946)

I hope for an America where we can all contend freely and vigorously, but where we will treasure and guard those standards of civility which alone make this nation safe for both democracy and diversity.

— Edward Kennedy

It is neither unusual nor new for me to have Negro friends, nor is it unusual for me to have found my friends among all races and religions of people.

— Eleanor Roosevelt, 1953

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive.

— Eric Hoffer

There is a new habit which ought to be supported by a practical philosophy of ethics. How to prize the distinctive difference of each individual. How to prize uniqueness. Not the conventional sameness of people. Not uniformity. But individuality. The ethical quality is that in which a person expresses uniqueness. The ethical act is the most individualized act.

— Felix Adler

Every person has an equal right to be different from others. Men and women; minorities and majorities; every one from every background has a right to develop a distinct personality.

— Felix Adler

[People] may be said to resemble not the bricks of which a house is built, but the pieces of a picture puzzle, each differing in shape, but matching the rest, and thus bringing out the picture.

— Felix Adler

Every one looks upon the world from a different angle. Every person becomes individualized through dealing with life. In the workshop of daily living the soul is born. The daily tasks is the anvil on which one must beat out one’s selfhood.

— Felix Adler

The garden of humanity should present the spectacle of flowers infinitely varied in hue and fragrance. The human orchard should include trees bearing the most diverse fruit.

— Felix Adler

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships — the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.

— Franklin Thomas

We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others.

— Fred Rogers

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Diversity contains as many treasures as those waiting for us on other worlds. We will find it impossible to fear diversity and to enter the future at the same time.

— Gene Roddenberry

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.

— George H. W. Bush

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.

— George H. W. Bush

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic… for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

— Germaine Greer

Be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brains fall out.

— Groucho Marx

Diversity happens, Inclusion is a choice.

— Harjeet Khanduja, How Leaders Decide: Tackling Biases and Risks in Decision Making

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

— James Baldwin

Diversity in all its forms is the path to greatness.

— James D. Wilson

The real death of America will come when everyone is alike.

— James T. Ellison
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