Quotes about Perception

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

None of us have pure thoughts; we all live in glass houses.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself.

People perceive me as a commodity. They just don't think anything of asking for five minutes of my time. It never occurs to them that if they're asking for it and another thousand people are asking, I don't have 1,000 five minutes to give.

To think of myself as a body, to be conscious of myself as a body, is to be conscious of other people's consciousness.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.

Once you label me you negate me.

there seemed to be a higher code of ethics and sisterliness among those prostitutes than among numerous ladies of the church who have more men for kicks than the prostitutes have for pay.

This is still one of the black man's big troubles today. So many of those so-called "upper class" Negroes are so busy trying to impress on the white man that they are "different from those others" that they can't see they are only helping the white man to keep his low opinion of all Negroes.