Exclusion Quotes

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]”
― Toni Morrison

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.”
― Audre Lorde

“We of alien looks or words must stick together.”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)”
― Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

“Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“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?”
― Richard Bachman, Thinner

“What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“ There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside. ”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes.

Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins.
And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“The continuum in which we live is not the kind of place in which middles can be unambiguously excluded. ”
― Reuben Abel

“There's no key to great relationships, there's simply a well worn welcome mat.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“Exclusion lights up the same regions of the brain as physical pain.”
― Britt Andreatta, Wired to Connect

“She felt excluded, unappreciated and unloved. Never had been loved.”
― Suzie Wilde, The Book of Bera

“I'd look on as old men walked down city streets arm in arm with their wives. I would watch babies resting on their mothers' bellies in patches of grass and sunlight in Central Park. I would watch cigarette-smoking teenagers glittering with meanness and youth, whispering and laughing as they shopped on lower Broadway. These exchanges of intimacy were all the same to me because they excluded me [...]”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that, ironically, with each advance made it is anger—not hope, much less elation—that deepens in the petitioners at the gate. Ironic but not surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be reminded repeatedly that one is not wanted, never had been, never will be.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life

“The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

“When a person is deserted, he learns by default, how to survive.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“It’s about loving someone and seeing them as a part of your family. I think some people have the capacity to see different people as part of their family and some don’t.”
― Hal Schrieve, Out of Salem

“For 100 years, governments of every colour were committed to enlarging the language of citizenship. Now Mrs. Thatcher's government is committed to closing it.”
― Jonathan Raban, God, Man & Mrs Thatcher

“Je l’ai prié de me suivre dans une pièce fermée. Il a refusé de s’asseoir. Je me suis alors assis devant lui et durant une heure et quart, je lui ai parlé de sa mort imminente. Je lui ai décrit la progression des symptômes. De sa souffrance. Du délire fébrile. De la puanteur croissante de sa pourriture… J’étais tour à tour détaché et proche, froid et compatissant, précis et grossier. Étrange corps à corps. Bras de fer vaguement pervers. En un sens, j’avais gagné d’avance, moi qui étais bien vivant et bien portant. Mais, aussi bien, j’avais perdu d’avance car lui, le presque mort, n’avait plus rien à perdre. Il marchait dans la pièce, tantôt nerveux, tantôt ailleurs. Parfois ému. Souvent ricanant. Maniaque. Jouissant de la folle immortalité du mégalomane. Il tenait sa vie et sa mort dans sa main. Il était tout-puissant. Devant ce Dieu, je n’étais rien. Il jouait tout, décidait de tout. Moi, je blablatais à ses pieds, fonctionnaire, préposé au guichet de la santé pépère. Ridicule valet de la normalité, mon urgence n’était pas la sienne. Son temps n’était pas le mien. Il était d’une autre essence, d’une autre hauteur.
C’est comme ça quand ils sont jeunes. La jeunesse est immortelle. Elle ignore le temps. Aussi la mort n’a pas de poids. Elle n’est que bande dessinée. Rigolade. C’est une mort de carton. Une affaire héroïque de violence, de révolte et de sang. Une explosion. Un orgasme. Une giclure. La mort fait bander. Elle est affaire de couilles. Histoire d’homme. Crever jeune, c’est dire merde au monde. Et le foutre bien profond. La jeunesse, à la face du temps, pisse de l’infini.”
― Patrick Declerck, Les naufragés - Avec les clochards de Paris

“The gospel excludes none who do not exclude themselves.”
― Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible-Book of Colossians

“I got a book, read the same lines over and over, in desperation to just pass the time and get out of those tall towers which (for quite a long time) I called home.”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“Thank you for excluding me so much. I got so fed up that I found my way out.”
― Leslie Roach, Finish this Sentence

“Want to come over this weekend?’ I asked.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
I didn’t like the way she didn’t look up from her phone while she talked. I was sure she was sending messages to Tracey, who, no doubt, was sending similar communiques right back.
‘Why are you being like this?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. She smiled a little and bit her lower lip. Her long blond braid dangled on her shoulder. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I’m not doing anything.’
Something about the coyness in her face felt familiar. In that moment I recalled a pale redhead named Alison who had been Hanna’s best friend before me. This was years earlier, fourth grade, but I remembered the way Alison used to float toward us on the playground sometimes, how Hanna would ignore her while we practiced our tricks on the bars where there was room for only two. ‘I’m so sick of her,’ Hanna would say to me whenever she saw Alison approaching, and then she would look at Alison with the same fake smile that she was now using on me.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

“Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price.

For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again.

As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth.

Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.”
― Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

“The world is not a safe place for us. There are cartographers who came and made a map of the world as they saw it. They did not leave a place for us to write our names on that map. But here we are, we’re in it, this world that does not want us, a world that will never love us, a world that would choose to destroy us rather than make a space for us even though there is more than enough room. There is no room for us because it has already been decided that exile is our only choice.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

“[The Gaze of an Invisible Stranger]
In western Europe and north America
In the cities of cruelty, racism, freedom & democracy,
Cities of exile and alienation,
You see many young people
Who’d rather die than greet a stranger,
You observe how they master the art of ignoring
And not acknowledging the humanity of anyone
Who is not their height and weight
Whose features, skin color, and eyes are different than theirs…
In return, you observe cities filled with older people
Who delight at a nod or greeting from any stranger
Who are hungry for the slightest kind human touch
From any by passerby…
Making you, the Invisible Stranger, wonder:
Did these same elderly folks raise the young ones?
Are they merely inheriting a world of their creation?
Do the young ones realize
The isolation, loneliness, and desolation awaiting them tomorrow?

[Original poem published in Arabic on January 3, 2023, at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako