378 Quotes About Labels

Thoughts and ideas cannot be criminalized but when they are used to groom and entice aggression to where beliefs turn into bullets then labels become of utmost importance.

It's possible to name everything and to destroy the world.

She doesn't like to use people's names, other than mine, anyway. She prefers self-designated titles: The Enforcer, Pack Leader, Hall Moniter, Socio, Daddy Issues. She likes to keep a nice healthy distance from anyone and everyone because, in her mind, it helps her stay in control...Once I asked her how she would label herself. Broken Girl, she answered.

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

People don't want other people to be people.

(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.