“Often, we are not courageous enough to tell the truth because we fear societal prejudices and perceptions.”

“Actually, this is a poem my father once showed me, a long time ago. It has been bastardized many times, in many ways, but this is the original:The Cold Within Six men trapped by happenstance,in bleak and bitter coldEach possessed a stick of wood,or so the story’s told. Their dying fire in need of logs,the first man held his back For of the faces round the fire,he noticed one was black. One man looking cross the way, saw one not of his churchAnd could not bring himself to givethe fire his stick of birch. The third one sat in tattered clothes,he gave his coat a hitchWhy should his log be put to useto warm the idle rich?The rich man just sat back and thoughtof the wealth he had in store And how to keep what he had earnedfrom the lazy, shiftless poor.The black man’s face bespoke revengeas the fire passed from his sight,For all he saw in his stick of woodwas a chance to spite the white.And the last man of this forlorn groupdid naught except for gain,Giving only to those who gave,was how he played the gameThe logs held tight, in death’s stillhands,was proof of human sinThey didn’t die from the cold without,they died from the cold within.”

“The efforts to rise from darkness into light, from ignorance to knowledge, from prejudices to free thinking, make us real wise beings.”

“…to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice…Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath – who were they? Only be reading could she find out.”

“Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.”

“Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.”

“She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance – a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

“A man once asked me … how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. “Well,” said the man, “I shouldn’t have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.” I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

“I can ill-afford to turn the fickle propensity of my attitude into the rock hard conviction of a fact. For if my attitude is given that much room to run, it will run from the very ‘fact’ that it purports to be.”

“When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.”

“My dad always says, some people will treat you badly and you can’t help that. But how you handle it and how it makes you feel, that’s up to you.”

“Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire — a very good and necessary element nevertheless — because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them.”