Geraldine Brooks Quotes

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

A society which emphasizes uniformity is one which creates intolerance and hate.

It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't.

In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

Exactly Straight women who surround themselves only with gay men or white people who refuse any other race into their circles are unhealthy and it has more to do with one's individual fear and individual closets.

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us.

People are always afraid of the unknown - and banding together against the Thing That Is Different From Us is a time-honoured tradition for rallying the masses.

As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian.

It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

I am certainly not racist; I even like the British.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

You see, that's the problem I have with 'you people.'

Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

There is, however, no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

The law of dislike for the unlike will always prevail…unlike is normally situated at a safe distance.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.