Label Quotes - page 8
I have always worked on the assumption that if something is valid and meaningful to me, it will also be valid and meaningful to many others. Not to everyone of course. On the basis of this assumption I do not think of an audience when I work, but only of my own reactions. By the same token I do not worry whether what I am doing is art or not. If what I paint is expressive, if it seems to communicate the feeling that is important to me, then I am not concerned if my work does not have marked earmarks of art. My work has been called abstract, surrealistic, totemistic and primitive.... I chose my own label and called my paintings 'Pictographs'..
Adolph Gottlieb
I know I get up people's noses," "Everyone wants to pigeonhole you. Early on in my career I somehow got labelled 'Bach, John Cage and a bit of jazz'. But the fact that I love to play Beethoven, too, really infuriates people. It doesn't fit. They can't make sense of it. The received wisdom is that you can't possibly do all these things without it sounding terrible or crass or just plain wrong.
Joanna MacGregor
Anybody that gives even a just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled antisemite. The Jew cries louder than anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn't pat him on the back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti-Semite.
Malcolm X
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!
Richard Dawkins
Those of us from Chasm started calling it the Visitor because that's a relatively comfortable label. It implies the stay is temporary, that the thing will go away. We think the Visitor must be part of a race of beings who live in space, though we're guessing at that. We also postulate that they hitch rides on bits of space trash that are moving somewhere, like the huge one that came at us. Anyhow, the Visitor is getting closer by the day.
Sheri S. Tepper
Many men, labelled homosexual by themselves and others, want to be fathers. Their beliefs and those of your society leads them to imagine that they must always be heterosexual or homosexual. Many feel a desire toward women that is also inhibited. Your male or female orientation limits you in ways that you do not understand. For example, in many cases the gentle "homosexual" father has a better innate idea of manliness than a heterosexual male who believes that men must be cruel, insensitive, and competitive.
Robert Butts
The writer in relation to the nature of perceivable reality and what is beyond - imperceivable reality - is the basis for all these studies, no matter what resulting concepts are labelled, and no matter in what categorized microfiles writers are stowed away for the annals of literary historiography. Reality is constructed out of many elements and entities, seen and unseen, expressed, and left unexpressed for breathing-space in the mind.
Nadine Gordimer
