I haven't got a racist bone in my little finger.

 

I haven't got a racist bone in my little finger.
--
Cryptic response to claims that he is a racist

 

Norman Tebbit

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Viewed at its grandest, P.C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that's still okay, everybody is a racist or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. Again, I say, I am a racist. I am not as racist as my parents. My children will not be as racist as I am. Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P.C. seeks to get things done right now. In a generation or at the snap of a finger, you can simply announce yourself to be purged of these atavisms.

 

Martin Amis

 

In my sights I carve him
like a sculptor. I mold out
his last look at everyone.
I carry his eyes and his
brain bone at every position.
I know his male sex and I do
march over him with my index finger.
His mouth and his anus are one.
I am at the center of feeling.

 

Anne Sexton

 

'Racist' used to be a powerful word that would have stopped any civilised person in their tracks, but now, when I hear it, my initial reflex is to think less of the person using it, and to wish they would invest in a dictionary to save embarrassing themselves any further. Nobody is a racist for objecting to religious privilege, or for wanting everyone to obey the same laws, or for wanting full and equal human rights for everyone without exception. And nobody is a racist for not wanting to eat the cruelty of halal-slaughtered meat without being told about it, or for asking someone to show their face in public, or for not wanting to be treated by hospital staff who haven't washed their hands properly because of their stupid religion. And nobody is a racist for asking the police to do their job and uphold the law. Two thousand young girls in Britain were genitally mutilated last year, a crime that's supposed to carry a fourteen-year prison sentence. Nobody has been prosecuted because police and social workers don't want to cause offence and damage community relations. How thoughtful. How sensitive. Damaging a few thousand young girls, on the other hand, or should I say maiming them for life, is apparently a price worth paying for community cohesion, or should that be cultural terrorism?

 

Pat Condell

 

Signposts are not the destination, maps are not the terrain. Life is too rich and textured to be fitted into pigeonholes, let alone equated with them. No affirmation is more than a finger pointing to the moon. And, lest attention turn to the finger, Zen will point, only to withdraw its finger at once.

 

Huston Smith

 

A religious belief… is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating — these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

 

Anthony de Mello