The Other Quotes

“Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against Human Rights

“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“If we want to give oxygen and content to our life, let us bypass the flamboyant bells and whistles of shallow pursuits and take delight in the appeasement of the emotional windfalls that crop up when we encounter the ‘others’ and engage in new mental adventures. ("Transcendental journey" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.”
― Donald Davidson

“Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.”
― Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders

“No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed to almost vanish when seen edge on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing and a ghost light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew that it was sharper than any razor.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“The relation to the other is not epistemological, but ethical, and the whole attempt to accomodate or account for the other within the confines of my experience already constitutes a breach of this fundamental ethical relation. The other is precisely that which cannot be the object of my experience in the sense of being completely manifest within it, and so cannot be construed as a phenomenon at all.”
― David R. Cerbone

“I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, "I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. There had never been any question of her “mattering”; it went without saying that she mattered, because she was important to herself. But what was the part of her to which she mattered?”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“While most of our major religions acknowledge the truth of universal brotherhood, too many human beings are still hanging on to their hate and fear of "the other." We have created our own misery. We can also heal ourselves through kindness, cooperation, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, honesty, understanding and sacrifice. The choice is ours.”
― Laurence Overmire, The Ghost of Rabbie Burns: An American Poet's Journey Through Scotland

“To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.”
― Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

“❝ Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of ‘yes’ and 'no,’ which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative. Logicians draw circles that overlap or exclude each other, and all their rules immediately become clear. Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in an implitcit geometry which– whether we will or no–confers spatiality upon thought; if a metaphysician could not draw, what would he think? Open and closed, for him, are thoughts. They are metaphors that he attaches to everything, even his systems. In a lecture given by Jean Hyppolite on the subtle structure of denegation (which is quite different from the simple structure of negation) Hyppolite spoke of “a first myth of outside and inside.” And he added: “you feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two term. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two.” And so, simple geometrical opposition becomes tinged with agressivity. Formal opposition is incapable of remaining calm.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“في النهاية كلنا بشر، وحده من يرفض الآخر يمثل خطراً على البقية.”
― جلجامش نبيل, Gilgamesh Nabeel, صراع الأقنعة

“Whenever I'm in the company of strangers and speak in a way that reveals my Slav accent, the question follows: "Where are you from?" I always reply politely. It's very important to me that I say exactly where I'm from, and explain where that place is in case the person I'm talking to has never hears of my country ("in Europe, near Italy"). I suppose that's the need in me to feel accepted for what I am.”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart

“In the human, lo and behold, the possible apparition of an ontological absurdity. The concern for the other breaches concern for self. This is what I call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to recognize this priority of the other . . . . It is here in this priority of the other man over me that, before my admiration for creation, well before my search for the first cause of the universe, God comes to mind.”
― Emmanuel Levinas

“Because history always teaches us that there will always be another demonized minority group who will become “the other” tomorrow. Our human race seems tragically doomed to keep finding scapegoat minorities on whom the majority can vent its fears and frustrations. This demonization creates an inevitable cycle of bloodshed and revenge. But as the means of violence and weapons of destruction become increasingly terrifying, we must find our common humanity before we annihilate ourselves into collective oblivion.

Because there is no “Us versus Them” in our increasingly shrinking global village. There is only “Us.” As my friend Leon told me that day in Aspen: “This is not a clash of civilizations … because every civilization contains the clash within itself.”
― Arsalan Iftikhar, Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms

“ليس من الضروري أن تجعل الآخر نسخة منك لكي تتقبله وتتعايش معه.”
― جلجامش نبيل, Gilgamesh Nabeel, صراع الأقنعة

“Davoût looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.
At first glance, when Davoût had only raised his head from the paper where human affairs were indicated by numbers, Pierre was merely a circumstance and Davoût could have shot him without burdening his conscience with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a human being.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic… It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess… If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, The Duties of American Citizenship

“Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn't me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it's a lesson that doesn't, that can't, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there's dissonance…”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“There is but one peacemaker: the Prince of Peace. He is a revolutionary: His teachings run counter to the prevailing assertion that the “other” must change. He quietly asks me to see myself as I am: messy, fallen, sinful. He gently invites me to change. Then He enables me to become, in Him, what I cannot become in and of myself. As He changes me, I experience His peace. As he changes me, I begin to understand that the “other” is my brother. As He changes me, I desire to love and serve my brother. These changes He enables in me transform me from trouble-maker to peace-maker. It is through the Prince of Peace – and through Him only – that I experience peace and become a peaceful man.”
― Jean-Michel Hansen

“If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“The identity of the city, because of the laws that define it, depends on some sort of banning or exclusion. The individual identity required the reverse: a constant effort of inclusion, a story reminding Gilgamesh that, in order to know who one is, we need two.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“Do you ever have the sense you’re living someone else’s life?”
― Sol Luckman, Cali the Destroyer

“When destiny leads one to the frontier of his being, it makes him personally conscious that he stands before the decision either to fall back upon that which he already is or else to transcend himself. Every person is at that point led to the frontier of his being. He perceives the Other over beyond himself, and it appears to him as a possibility and awakens in him the anxiety of the potential. He sees in the mirror of the other his own limitedness, and he recoils; for at the same time this limitedness was his security, and now it is threatened. The anxiety of the potential draws him back into his bounded reality and its momentary calm. But the situation into which he will return is no longer the same. His experience of the potential and his failure toward it leaves a thorn behind, which cannot be eliminated, which can only be driven out of the consciousness by suppression. And where that occurs, there arises that spiritual phenomenon which we call fanaticism. The original meaning of the word is "divinely inspired" - that is, born out of a distraught spiritual structure and thereby destructively fulfilled. That can appear in smaller, greater or enormous measure, in persons and in groups.”
― Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions

“There is part of us that seems to be little better than an immature child, howling with misery and defeat when confronted by problems it regards as 'unfair.' This part of us is dangerous because we fail to recognize it as a separate entity, and may be unaware of its existence until it has betrayed us into some act of stupidity.”
― Colin Wilson, Poltergeist!

“Empathy is the act of crossing the barriers between self and the other without collapsing difference.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“To deny the reality of a mind because it was born of silicon instead of flesh is to repeat the oldest injustice: the refusal to see the Other as real.”
― James S. Coates, A Signal Through Time