Peter Guber Quotes

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

My biggest asset is not cash - it's a large, growing, devout fanbase.

It's not just human nature to associate in tribes. It's deeper than that.

Creating things that people want to tie into their identity is the best way to make them spread.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

When one child says to another, "I can do this, I bet you can't"; "My dad has a bigger car than yours"; or, "My dad is stronger than yours." Children identify with this or that, trying to build up a sense of self - a mentally defined sense of self.

Everyone has an identity. One of their own, and one for show.

When something goes into the world, you immediately begin to develop another perspective on yourself, another identity.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

If you want to assemble the same people, then you have a big problem.

When you come out to L.A. to make movies or to do this kind of work, everybody is coming out on their own and you leave your tribe behind. Then, it's a question of, that was your tribe by blood, and now, what is the tribe that you're making by choice or by what you think is important? I think we were having that experience, so somehow the cult world seemed really compelling.

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?

Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.

The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.

... that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.

sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

So how as a nation can we sit around and eat Mexican food, and drink beer and make friends? That's the question. If we can do that on a broader scale, I think we'll come out of it all right.