10 Quotes Tagged: exclusion

What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence, or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

"[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.

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.

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

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.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

The more you know about exclusion, the more you think about belonging. We have a crisis of belonging in this country.

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

[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998]

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door