Slurs Quotes

“Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is one-hundred-per-cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback’s name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“All I want to shout is 'Moaty, it's Gazza!', and I guarantee me and him could sit and chat. I would say, 'Why don't you just put the gun away, throw it in the river? The police are not going to kill you.”
― Paul Gascoigne

“I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

“Like Rachel Dolezal, I too became black around the age of five. I first became a n----r at nine, so I had me a good run.”
― Kevin Young, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback’s name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city’s a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America’s deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I’ll have you know, my sister’s daughter is married to an orangutan.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“An ego devoted to fighting against all the world’s slurs is bound for trouble.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I ain't no circus or zoo animal, to sit 'n bear slurs, you fool. My name is Victor Volcano, you're safe, so long as I'm cool.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers

“Vapers are cunt wands,' Donna snaps.”
― Colin Walsh, Kala

“You never forget your first "faggot." Because the memory, in its way, makes you. It becomes a spine for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on. Before you were just scrawny; now you're scrawny because you're a faggot. Before you were just bookish; now you're bookish because you're a faggot.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives