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I’d rather be indebted than be the kind of white man who thinks the world owes him, because to live an ethical life is to be held accountable to history.

— Cathy Park Hong Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

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More quotes by Cathy Park Hong

To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

What Black and Asian and brown people know about each other is what white people have said about us, and this is why the real problem is still white supremacy, even if the perpetrators aren’t white.

Interview with Vox (2021)

minor feelings — that feeling of being targeted and ashamed, but not knowing why and not having it be explained to you.

Interview with Vox (2021)

All Cathy Park Hong quotes →

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Cathy Park Hong (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.