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It’s such a pity that a Chinaman is fastidious. He will not take a battered old prostitute of the seaport but wants something young, attractive, above all clean and free from venereal disease. UK Home Office guidance
The Negro is said to be more largely developed than the white man, and a woman who has once been with a Negro is said to find no satisfaction with anything else. Home Office memo to Foreign Office 1925
The black man ... has a different set of standards, values, morals and principles. In many cases their grandfathers were eating each other. James Wentworth Day
Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And segregation for ever. George Wallace, Alabama governor
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen. Enoch Powell, speech 20th April 1968
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. ibid.
Mortimer: Of course there’s something wrong with him. He’s a Negro. Probably been stealing since he could crawl. Trading Places 1983 starring Dan Aykroyd & Eddie Murphy & Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche & Denholm Elliott & Jamie Lee Curtis & Kristin Holby & Paul Gleason, director John Landis
Randoph: We took a perfectly useless psychopath like Valentine and turned him into a successful executive. During the same time we turned an honest hard-working man into a violently deranged would-be killer. Ha ha ha ...
Mortimer: Do you really believe I would have a nigger run our family business, Randolph?
Randolph: Of course not. Neither would I. ibid.
A jewel set in Australia’s northern sea is Bathurst Island – it’s inhabited by a people whose instincts are not far removed from the lower animals. White missionaries have come among the coloured Aboriginals; they are doing noble work in saving the blacks from themselves. Pathé News
The general English populace has no idea of the Jewish danger ... Our worst Jews only operate behind the scenes ... We look forward to the day when we can say with force and authority: England for the English! Jews get out! Unity Mitford, open letter
How can we say to a Negro in Jackson when war comes you will be an American citizen but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi, and we cannot help you? How by any moral standards can we tell our Negro citizens our forefathers brought your forefathers over here against their will and we are going to make you pay for it? Yet isn’t that what this argument boils down to? The United States is dominated by white people politically and economically. The question is whether we in this position of dominance are going to have not the charity but the wisdom to stop penalising our fellow citizens whose only former sin is that they were born. Robert Kennedy
Some of the Turks ... and the Blacks ... their nature is like the nature of mute animals ... they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Rabbi Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, Book III Chapter 51
I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust ... We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better. Thurgood Marshall
And I’ll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighbouring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students’ Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defences are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this – this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you. Christopher Hitchens
Anti-semitism was preached as an official doctrine of the church until 1964 – do you think that might have something to do with public opinion in Austria and Bavaria and Poland and Lithuania – that the Jewish people were accused collectively of deicide? Christopher Hitchens, & Stephen Fry v the Catholic Church, debate 2009
You don’t call retarded people retards. The Office US s3e1: Gay Witch Hunt, Michael, NBC 2006
I have a very strong prejudice against human resources. I believe that the department is a breeding ground for monsters. The Office US s4e18: Goodbye Toby I, Michael
I shake my head in amazement at how judgmental I’ve been in my life. It seems like I could write volumes about what I’ve seen recently, now that I’ve been trying so hard to eradicate this judgmental, warped lens from my eyes. I have robbed myself of many of the wonders that I could have experienced in relationships, all due to my judgmentalism. And now, the days that I can see more clearly without the distorting judgmentalism that I’ve had for so many years, have been some of the most amazing and enlightened days in my life. I have a lot more work to do, but ridding myself of judgmentalism, as hard as it continues to be, has been one of best things I’ve ever attempted.
Yes, there’s a lot more goodness out in the world than I was led to believe all these years! A lot more goodness than I ever allowed myself to see.
I’ve seen that there are a large number of people here that seem to deeply care about and understand the pain and suffering others have gone through on their personal journeys. But how can that be?
You’re supposed to be evil apostates ‘kicking at the pricks’ on the highway to hell, right? life redux, board post 20th January 2008, ‘Hello and Thank You ... and an Apology for Judgmentalism and Hypocrisy’
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Thomas Jefferson
The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and Presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson 22 January 1825
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and Animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades. Sam Harris
Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavour in which ‘Us v Them’ thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics. Sam Harris