Difference Quotes

“The Road not Taken

[...]
I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference...”
― Robert Frost

“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“In the case of the Levant, it is mere question-begging rhetoric to insist that similarities are more fundamental or essential than differences. For who is to say, where human groups and their interestsare in question, what is fundamental and what is secondary, what is essential and what is accidental? And even if the answers were clear, they could not by themselves determine a political decision. Political decisions are not scientific conclusions; they are rather the promptings of the practical judgment, in which play their part inclination and duty, circumstance and foresight.”
― Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies

“We were beautifully different, and that was okay.”
― Razel Jones, Wounds

“In one corner of the room are an array of small prints of the birds with gold foil laid painstakingly into individual feathers. This is not a room; it is a menagerie, and standing in the midst of it, I am one of its birds. Beside me at the door, Qamar is weeping, and I am trembling like a person in snow. One day, someone will try to explain us as they once tried to explain this, and they will not have the words.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Those who make a difference in this world are the ones who are not afraid of being different.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I brought Grand Rapids with me to Newaygo. I brought difference. I was used to a fluid concept of harmony. I was used to diversity. Homogenous harmony has walls. As a fourteen-year-old boy in Newaygo, I felt those walls.”
― Daniel Abbott, Wounds

“I learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.
Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.
Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The difference between teachers and activist teachers is one is dedicated to offering the ability to think clearly and the other is often committed to destroying that clarity.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“IF NOTHING IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU, WHAT IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT FROM YOU IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

“A line between white and black had been drawn in my life. I straddled that line with an ache I had no name for. An ache I now understand as identity crisis.”
― Daniel Abbott, Wounds

“I believe she adores love.
I think love is her absolute language
But she is so in denial of this truth that she stems away from it.
There's something inside of her that is waiting, I don't know what, but she is.
But until then she lies within her silence and smiles at anyone who even dares to cross her path.

She is too loving to deny that she yearns for love.
She is too selfless to deny that she wants comfort.
She is too precious to deny that she is deserving.

She is love, whether she wants to admit it or not.

She is.”
― Kaelyn Rene

“If we understand the divinity of our existence, we will accept our diversity.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Two types of people walk this earth, The formed and the conformed.”
― Oluseyi Akinbami

“Wherever you are, you can make a difference, act now.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“I do not see much difference between the USA government in 2020 and Adolf Hitler’s evil Nazi regime.”
― Steven Magee

“In the case of the Levant, it is mere question-begging rhetoric to insist that similarities are more fundamental or essential than differences. For who is to say, where human groups and their interests are in question, what is fundamental and what is secondary, what is essential and what is accidental? And even if the answers were clear, they could not by themselves determine a political decision. Political decisions are not scientific conclusions; they are rather the promptings of the practical judgment, in which play their part inclination and duty, circumstance and foresight.”
― Elie Kedourie

“Wer der Norm entspricht, kann dem Irrturm erliegen, dass es sie nicht gibt. Wer der Mehrheit ähnelt, kann dem Irrturm erliegen, dass die Ebenbildlichkeit mit der die Norm setzenden Mehrheit keine Rolle spielt. Wer der Norm entspricht, dem oder der fällt oft nicht auf, wie sie anderer ausgrenzt oder degradiert. Wer der Norm entspricht, kann sich oft ihre Wirkung nicht vorstellen, weil die eigene Akzeptanz als selbstverständlich angenommen wird.”
― Carolin Emcke, Gegen den Hass

“Wherever you are, you can make a difference.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“There are two types
of people
when it comes to love
the one who wants you and
the one who can do anything
to have you
- The difference”
― Jyoti Patel, ANAMIKA: BEYOND WORDS

“As a queer person, I believe almost dogmatically in difference, in the idea that every single person is unique, with their own innate sense of self, and that it is this difference which brings all of us together as one.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Remember, please is the magic word, but its not the Magic Wyrd.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“Prison is not a good idea because it puts two people in prison: the prisoner and the guard. And the rest of us become inheritors of The Fugitive Slave Law, requiring us to turn in people who seek their freedom through the Underground Railroad or the overland express, or face the consequences of the full force of the law for not doing so. Newspapers, radio, television, and movies have made us afraid of our fellow citizens who are accused of being heretics, witches, christians, Jews, Muslims, drug lords, drug users, prostitutes, sodomites, anything somehow different from what we think we are or should be but not afraid of slum lords, union busters, corrupt and graft-taking politicians, insider traders, employers paying less than minimum wage, college presidents shutting down debate.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes

“You are not one of them. You are among them. But never one of them.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Why so little difference between FACES and FECES?”
― Marin .

“A woman of virtue is not a weakling. Yes, she knows her weaknesses, yet she won’t let them define her. She makes a difference in the world.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“An inspirational woman has a good influence and makes a great difference in the world.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people. (...) Culture does not make people. People make culture.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists