Excluding Quotes

“Next time, involve me in what you’re planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn’t always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn’t notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?”

“Next time, involve me in what you’re planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn’t always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn’t notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?”

“South Africa is the only country where an overwhelming majority in complete political control is apparently so threatened by a tiny minority that they need racist affirmative action policies to protect the majority by legislatively excluding the minority totally from the job market.”

“It is wisdom to know who you are, but not to the point of excluding who you might become.”

“Two people can form a community by excluding a third.”

“I would like to think of myself as an artist...excluding the part where he bows before an audience. There are no appreciations for killings.”

“Excluding the God of providence in your life’s configuration and design is like removing the thermostat from a thermodynamic system.”

“Vera had also hated lipstick, Marzipan and Lutherans - excluding her husband, but not her late mother-in-law. Most of all she hated being governed by anyone or anything.”

“For breakfast to be called ‘in bed’ instead of ‘on top of a bed,’ the house in which it is about to be eaten has to have at least two rooms (excluding the kitchen); (at least) three, if it has a bathroom.”

“We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.”

“I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.”