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...a minority is only thought of as a minority if it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is <i>ever</i>… - Christopher Isherwood
" "...a minority is only thought of as a minority if it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary...Just ask yourselves: what would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority, overnight?
'All right - now along come the liberals - including everybody in the room, I trust - and they say, 'minorities are just people, like us '. Sure, minorities are people, just like us'. Sure, minorities are people; people , not angels. Sure, they're like us - but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria, in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see a difference between a Negro and a Swede -'
(Why, oh why daren't George say 'between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen'? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in the classroom 278. But then, again, maybe it wouldn't.)
'So,let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us, and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear out feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety-valve; and if we have a safety-valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting...
English
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About Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was a British-American writer.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
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Additional quotes by Christopher Isherwood
There is one question which we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow-travellers. What makes you go on living? Why don't you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?
Could I answer that question about myself? No. Yes. Perhaps . . . I supposed, vaguely, that it was a kind of balance, a complex of tensions. You did whatever was next on the list. A meal to be eaten. Chapter eleven to be written. The telephone rings. You go off somewhere in a taxi. There is one's job. There are amusements. There are people. There are books. There are things to be bought in shops. There is always something new. There has to be. Otherwise, the balance would be upset, the tension would break.
Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it’s hopeless? But George knows he can’t do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It’s just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.
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The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.
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