"'Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.'"
— Kevin Smith

""Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he.
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."
"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.""
— A.A. Milne

"Never judge someone
By the way he looks
Or a book by the way it's covered;
For inside those tattered pages,
There's a lot to be discovered"
— Stephen Cosgrove

"He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass. "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear. "
— Gene Roddenberry

"The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. "
— Thomas Stephen Szasz

"It is never too late to give up your prejudices"
— Henry David Thoreau

"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of."
— Alex Shakar (The Savage Girl)

"I have a self-made quote: Celebrate diversity, practice acceptance and may we all choose peaceful options to conflict."
— Donzella Michele Malone

"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. "
— John F. Kennedy

"The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world."
— Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

"It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength."
— Maya Angelou

"I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable…has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)

"Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth."
— Theodore Roosevelt (The Man In The Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt)

"[There] was a time when a lot of people came to the door. The milkman. The iceman. The Fuller Brush man. Encyclopedia salesmen. There was a sense of interaction with the world that started right at your own front doorstep."
— Catherine Ryan Hyde (Walter's Purple Heart)

"If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times."
— Wade Davis (The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World)

"As you walk, hop, hobble, or wheel
Meeting people of different kinds,
Remember that being handicapped
Is only a state of mind"
— Stephen Cosgrove (Fanny)

"You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'"

"But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)

"By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective."
— Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)

"The universe is full of men going through the same motions in the same surroundings, but carrying within themselves, and projecting around them, universes as mutually remote as the constellations."
— Emmanuel Mounier (Personalism)

"I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories)

"No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

"Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?"
— Malcolm Margolin

"Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

"I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea."
— Patricia Geary (Strange Toys)

"She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it."
— Kiana Davenport (Shark Dialogues)

"In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society."
— Patricia J. Williams ("On Being the Object of Property," Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary Ameri

"Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live."
— Deborah Levy (Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places)

"There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)