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.
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.
The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one’s own tradition with reverence for different traditions.
The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
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.
Any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve.
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.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
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.
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching privilege to difference.
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.
Storytelling can be the most potent way to celebrate progress, inspire change, and bring about a more diverse world. If stories shape our perceptions, then perhaps the stories we never hear shape our biases through the lack of awareness they enable.
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.
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.
We are all different, which is great because we are all unique. Without diversity, life would be very boring.
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
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.
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.
I was motivated to be different in part, because I was different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.
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.
Be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brains fall out.
Diversity happens, Inclusion is a choice.
Diversity in all its forms is the path to greatness.
The real death of America will come when everyone is alike.
Civilization is a method of living and an attitude of equal respect for all people.
It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.
America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread.
We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength.
The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.
Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another’s experience in order to tell him intelligently of one’s own experience.
