"If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn't even begun to pull out the knife."
Ethnicity quotes
131 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside ethnicity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"It isn't that it's questionable when you speak up for the right of people with different sexual orientation. People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation. People are killed because they're gay."
"What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender."
"Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be."
"All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice."
"Whatever your ethnicity is, in this life you are going to be on a journey to discover who you are and how you feel about yourself."
"Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere."
"American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen."
"It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not."
"Our enemies may be irrational, even outright insane, driven by nationalism, religion, ethnicity or ideology. They do not fear the United States for its diplomatic skills or the number of automobiles and software programs it produces. They respect only the firepower of our tanks, planes and helicopter gunships."
"We absolutely need diversity [in game designers]. And not just diversity of gender, but diversity of cultures, of ethnicity, of sexuality. If we want to reach beyond the audience we have we've got to bring in more players, and to bring in more players we've got to bring in people who might be able to reach those players."
"Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace."
"I voted 'yes' and I urge all Iraqis, no matter their different ethnicities and religions ... to vote 'yes' to the constitution"
"People took some part of us and used it to discriminate against us. In our case, it was our ethnicity; it's precisely the same thing for sexual orientation."
"I hope to see more programming, more shows, more actors of mixed ethnicity, more young kids of mixed ethnicity choosing to be in the entertainment industry."
"I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism."
"The United States, we know what happens when we start dividing ourselves along lines of race or religion or ethnicity."
"Being Latina in the US is something I'm learning about everyday. I don't feel inherently different in any way from anybody else and it is a feeling I cherish and that has helped me avoid thinking of my ethnicity as a potential obstacle from what I want to achieve."
"So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures."
"In general, the auditions I go up for are very sparse, I guess because of my ethnicity. And the characters are very similar: shy, innocent and naive; the connotations that come from the way that I look."
"Whereas your blackness, ethnicity, homosexuality is something that might be genetic, I can't touch that, and I have no right."