Diversity Quotes (page 5)
You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.
Jane Jacobs
The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.
E. O. Wilson
Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.
Gene Roddenberry
Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds.
Raymond Queneau
The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.
Jane Jacobs
To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in...
Cornel West
The Christian church is an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and conceptions of the most diverse orgiin and that is why it is so capable of proselytising: it always could and it can still go wherever it pleases and it always found and it always finds something similar to itself to which it can adapt itself and gradually impose upon it a Christian meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There's always the possibility that you're going to come across a record that transforms your life. And it happens weekly. It's like a leaf on the stream. There are little currents and eddies and sticks lying in the water that nudge you in a slightly different direction. And then you break loose and carry on down the current. There's nothing that actually stops you and lifts you out of the water and puts you on the bank but there are diversions and distractions and alarums and excursions...
John Peel
Our culture promotes individuality, while the Amish are deeply entrenched in community. To us, if someone stands out, it's no big deal because diversity is respected and expected. To the Amish, there's no room for deviation from the norm. It's important to fit in, because that similarity of identity is what defines the society. If you don't fit in, the consequences are psychological tragic, you stand alone when all you've ever known is being part of the group.
Jodi Picoult
Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
Alain de Botton