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The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
KATE CHOPIN, The Awakening
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE, Jane Eyre
Prejudice is the glass through which most things are seen and judged.
I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
ROD SERLING, Los Angeles Times, 1967
Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.
JOHN WESLEY, letter to Joseph Benson, Oct. 5, 1770
At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
GORE VIDAL, "Sex and the Law," Homage to Daniel Shays
If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire, or which, more than any other, testifies to the much-contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race, it is that of establishing our common humanity — of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the physical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society.
WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT, Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos
When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, Parerga and Paralipomena
A fish will sometimes with pleasure rise out of his element, and spring into ours: so a man will sometimes with pleasure rise from prejudice and falsehood, into the sphere of reason and truth. But the fish will most naturally and joyfully dive again into his element of water; and the man as joyfully and naturally into his element of prejudice and falsehood.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
MARK TWAIN, Innocents Abroad
I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.
W.C. FIELDS, The Saturday Review, Jan. 28, 1967
The law understands the implacable nature of prejudice. It acknowledges that prejudiced judges ought not sit on a given case, although most prejudiced judges are too prejudiced to recognize or admit their prejudice and to remove themselves. To get a prejudiced judge off a case is like prying a tooth out of a rabid gorilla.
GERRY L. SPENCE, How to Argue and Win Every Time
Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963
Even if prejudice magically ceased today, the burden of the past would remain.
EVELYN B. PLUHAR, Beyond Prejudice
The greatest friend of Truth is time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words
Arguments do not erase prejudice any more than arguments erase scars, whether psychological or physical.
GERRY L. SPENCE, How to Argue and Win Every Time
Prejudice comes from being in the dark; sunlight disinfects it.
MUHAMMAD ALI, Jan Sutton's 1000 Pocket Positives
Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
RUSSELL KIRK, The Conservative Mind
Undoubtedly it is our duty, and for our best good, that we occupy and improve the faculties, with which our creator has endowed us, but so far as prejudice, or prepossession of opinion prevails over our minds, in the same proportion, reason is excluded from our theory or practice. Therefore if we would acquire useful knowledge, we must first divest ourselves of those impediments and sincerely endeavor to search out the truth: and draw our conclusions from reason and just argument, which will never conform to our inclination, interest or fancy but we must conform to that if we would judge rightly.
ETHAN ALLEN, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
Men's prejudices rest upon their character for the time being and cannot be overcome, as being part and parcel of themselves. Neither evidence nor common sense nor reason has the slightest influence upon them.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
All prejudices are obstinate, like diseases of chronic tenacity, and require radical cures.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
You deny that man is really so prejudiced as I suppose him; talk to him then of some foreign country, ask him what religion he is of.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
We talk of early prejudices, of the prejudices of religion, of position, of education; but in truth we only mean the prejudices of others. It is by the observation of trivial matters that the wise learn the influence of prejudice over their own minds at all times, and the wonderfully moulding power which those minds possess in making all things around conform to the idea of the moment. Let a man but note how often he has seen likenesses where no resemblance exists; admired ordinary pictures, because he thought they were from the hands of celebrated masters; delighted in the commonplace observations of those who had gained a reputation for wisdom; laughed where no wit was; and he will learn with humility to make allowance for the effect of prejudice in others.
ARTHUR HELPS, Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom.
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