identity quotes

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I’d always somehow felt slightly as if I’d been born in the wrong country.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

Proud 2 Pay – that’s something that distinguishes me, that’s something that defines me, and we’re going to keep that going.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

There’s Madeleine, and then there’s ‚Madeleine Albright‘. And I sometimes kind of think, who is this person? Once you become ‚Madeleine Albright‘ it doesn’t go away.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

I have had fun being who I became, so to speak.

We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

I feel Anglo-American.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

I don’t really like to call myself a brand, and I don’t like to think of myself as a brand. I’m a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that’s not my focus.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren’t all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you’re not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side, not the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

I don’t want to be called a point guard, but I can’t stop it.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.