Ronald Takaki · 508 pages
Rating: (3.2K votes)
“I believe our education system as a whole has not integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don't know the fact they don't know, because of the complete lack of information.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“the study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why America became what Walt Whitman called a “teeming nation of nations.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“Jefferson exploded with guilt: “The torment of mind, I will endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“ The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“What I find is that most people don’t know the fact that they don’t know, because of the complete lack of information.”4”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it.”8”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“In 1852, of the 11,794 Chinese in California, only seven were women.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.”
― Sebastian Barry, quote from The Secret Scripture
“I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few--very few, I would imagine--who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It's hard to generalize. For me, at least, I've written novels over many years, I just can't picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural. Not that I'm relieved when that happens. Even I'm not happy when someone dislikes me.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“Get busy living, or get busy dying”
― Stephen King, quote from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons
“Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.”
― Claire North, quote from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
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