The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach, but Reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind. Edward Gibbon, 1737-94, Memoirs of My Life ch1
The old appeals to racial, sexual, religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervour, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Who Speaks for Earth? PBS 1980
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities. Gore Vidal, Death Before Bedtime
The superior man is broadminded but not partisan; the inferior man is partisan but not broadminded. Confucius 551-479 B.C.
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive. Doris Lessing
To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life
I’m sick of this prejudice against ex-cons. The Sopranos s5e6: Sentimental Education starring James Gandolfini & Lorriane Bracco & Edie Falco & Michael Imperioli & Dominic Chianese & Steven van Zandt & Tony Sirico & Robert Iler et al, Tony Blundetto, HBO 2004
The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other. Star Trek s3e13: Elaan of Troyius, Kirk
Judging a being by its physical appearance is the last major human prejudice, Wesley. Star Trek: The Next Generation s2e19: Manhunt, Worf of the Antedians
The Bajorans who have lived with us on this station, who have worked with us for months, who helped us move this station to protect the wormhole, who joined us to explore the Gamma Quadrant, who have begun to build the future of Bajor with us. These people know that we are neither the enemy nor the devil. We don’t always agree. We have some damn good fights, in fact. But we always come away from them with a little better understanding and appreciation of the other. You won’t succeed here. The school will reopen. And when your rhetoric gets old, the Bajoran parents will bring their children back. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine s1e20: In the Hands of the Prophets, Sisko
Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don’t know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated. Martin Luther King
I had learned that I was in two wars: one against a foreign enemy and the other against prejudice at home. Jackie Robinson
I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist. Jack Johnson
Criticism is prejudice made plausible. H L Mencken
To others he [Paul] is the preacher of prejudices that have echoed down through history. David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul I, BBC 2012
Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument. Samuel Johnson
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792
This is Tommy Robinson, leader of the English Defence League. Proud & Prejudiced, Channel 4 2012
This film reveals an alarming portrait of street-level protest and anger in Britain today. Luton: just over thirty miles from London with a population of more than 200,000, almost 15% are Muslim. ibid.
Luton saw a summer of tension in which two hooded men attacked a local mosque. ibid.
The EDL is challenged everywhere it goes by United Against Fascism counter demonstrations. ibid.
The EDL is riven with internal factions. ibid.
Drive out prejudices through the door, and they will return through the window. Frederick the Great
We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced. Herbert Spencer
I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. Roger Ebert
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. W C Fields
It occurs to you that Ulysses is about cliché. It is about inherited, ready-made formulations – most notably Irish Catholicism and anti-Semitism. After all, prejudices are clichés: they are secondhand hatreds ... Joyce never uses a cliché in innocence. Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche, review of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye, – however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Popular resentment towards American and the intellectual insularity of Americans is part of everyday life in Canada. It is persistent, low-level, sometimes dumb and sometimes funny. Misha Glenny, McMafia
I was quoted out of context. No no no no no no no. What I said was, they’re a bunch of yellow commie short-arsed shifty slug-eating cheeky smelly woppo slitty-eyed bastards. And what do the press do? They take the slitty-eyed completely out of context and make me look a complete arse-hole. Spitting Image s3e15, Philip to Queen, ITV 1986
My name is Oscar Duke and I’m Albino. In parts of East Africa being born with my condition can be a death sentence. Their body parts are used in potions sold by witch-doctors. This World: Born Too White, BBC 2017
The difference has led to prejudice against albinos. ibid.
In Britain we have a serious problem with our weight. More of us are getting heavier and suffering from ill health, but who’s to blame? The cost of obesity is now so great it threatens to bankrupt our NHS. But what if I were to tell you there is a treatment that can help tackle our obesity crisis, one we’re not using because of an anti-fat prejudice? A bias that may even extend to our health services meaning many patients aren’t getting the best available care. A prejudice that has made the problem worse for us all. Obesity: How Prejudiced is the NHS? BBC 2017
Weight-loss surgery can put Type 2 diabetes into remission, even before the patient has lost any weight. I can’t understand why we’re not doing more of these operations. ibid.
On March 23rd the Trump administration announced new discriminatory measures against transgender people by banning them from military service, which had just been granted under Obama … It’s just the latest attack on the trans community since the right wing took power. Abby Martin, The Empire Files: The Hidden War on Trans Rights, 2018
In 2016 alone, more than fifty bills were introduced in Congress targeting the lives of trans people. ibid.