Labels Quotes

“It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.”
― W.C. Fields

“Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“Can we just call them storm spirits?” Leo asked. “Venti makes them sound like evil espresso drinks.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero

“Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.”
― Karen Marie Moning

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“You're a psychopath."
"I prefer creative.”
― Becca Fitzpatrick, Crescendo

“I'm not psycho...I just like psychotic things.”
― Gerard Way

“What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Once you label me you negate me.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“People are too complicated to have simple labels.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I am a rare species, not a stereotype.”
― Ivan Coyote

“I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Don't call me 'gentleman'. I work for a livin'.”
― Tamora Pierce

“Whoever thought a tiny candy bar should be called fun size was a moron.”
― Glenn Beck

“When I'm born I'm black, when I grow up I'm black, when I'm in the sun I'm black, when I'm sick I'm black, when I die I'm black, and you... when you're born you're pink, when you grow up you're white, when you're cold you're blue, when you're sick you're blue, when you die you're green and you dare call me colored”
― Oglala Lakota

“I think the very word stalking implies that you're not supposed to like it. Otherwise, it would be called 'fluffy harmless observation time'.”
― Molly Harper

“As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”
― Gregory Maguire

“And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“I was ecstatic when they re-named "French fries" as "freedom fries." Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots.”
― Johnny Depp

“They call her my singer—because her blood sings for me.”
― Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

“Sometimes letting go is simply changing the labels you place on an event. Looking at the same event with fresh eyes.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“You named your sword Fire? Fire? What kind of a boring name is that? You might as well name your sword 'Blazing Blade' and be done with it. Fire indeed. Humph. Wouldn't you rather have a sword called Sheepbiter or Chrysanthemum Cleaver or something else with imagination?”
― Christopher Paolini, Brisingr

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“People don't want other people to be people.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“What the hell kind of name is Kitty for a werewolf?”
― Carrie Vaughn

“I'm not asexual. I'm arelationshipal.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.”
― Ronald Reagan

“One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.”
― Winston S. Churchill