exclusion

For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.

The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.

I don't believe god has a darling tribe or nation, all tribes and nations are his darlings.

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

Next time, involve me in what you__e planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn__ always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn__ notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?

We of alien looks or words must stick together.

While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

Nothing is as unique as sex in nature; it is full of enjoyment, pleasure and happiness. There is no discrimination, no exclusion, no inequality and no racism.

When I am, you are not.

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

When we use power and group identity, we hold ourselves separate from other groups of people, and demonstrate our beliefs that some of use are more deserving than others, and there are not enough good things to go around. This blinkers us, There are a myriad of other ways humans can interact to meet the needs of us all.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in., March 9, 1998]

What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.

[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.