I am large. I contain multitudes.

- Walt Whitman

No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

- Pubilius Syrus

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

- John Stuart Mill

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks -- we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.

- Parker J. Palmer

And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place.

- Parker J. Palmer

Where there is power, there is resistance.

- Foucault

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.

- Louis D. Brandeis

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation -- or a relationship.

- Deborah Tannen

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

I would encourage us all, African Americans, Asians, Latinos, Whites, Native Americans to study history. I long for the time when all the human history is taught as one history. I am stronger because you are stronger. I am weaker if you are weak. So we are more alike than we are unlike. (source)

- Maya Angelou

Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.

- Karen Armstrong

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

- Lillian Hellman

I have spent many years of my life in opposition and I rather like the role.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

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

- Audre Lorde

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.

- Leo Tolstoy



Equality is not similarity. Equal merit does not mean that one is suited to the same tasks.

- George Sand



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

- Charles Evan Hughes



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



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



Democracy is this -- to hold
That all who wander down the pike
In cart or car, on foot or bike,
Or male or female, young or old,
Are much alike -- are much alike.

- Alice Duer Miller



Whatever is natural admits of variety.

- Madame de Stael



Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will always remember you. And if you're in a crowd, you'll always have some clean air to breathe.

- Julia Child



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



There's not one person in this crowd who's gonna agree with everything I say. Not one.

- Howard Dean



Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

- Cesar Chavez



Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.

- Walt Whitman



You were born an original ... Don't die a copy.

- John Mason



Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

- Amelia Earhart



We need not think alike to love alike.

- David Ferenc



To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

- Tony Robbins



There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

- Bernice Johnson Reagon



The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

- Angela Carter



Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.

- Madame de Stael



Differences challenge assumptions.

- Anne Wilson Schaef



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



The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

- Jerome Nathanson



[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



Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.



If you come from, say, the northeastern part of the United States when you're listening you need to show you're alive. You need to talk along. That's the way you show you're interested. But in many parts of the United States if you talk along, that's rude, that's interruption. Now, we all agree interruption is rude. But we don't agree on what constitutes an interruption.

- Deborah Tannen



America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.

- Ralph Ellison



Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

- Mary Catherine Bateson



Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

- Daniel Patrick Moynihan



For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

- Donald Williams



I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stiffled. I want all the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi