# Quote — Erving Goffman, Stigma

> Personal identity, like social identity, divides up the individual's world of others for him. The division is first between the knowing and the unknowing. The knowing are those who have a personal identification of the individual; they need only see him or hear his name to bring this information into play. The unknowing are those for whom the individual constitutes an utter stranger, someone of whom they have begun no personal biography.

- Author: [Erving Goffman](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman.md)
- Book: [Stigma](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma.md)
- Page: 85
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman#Stigma,_1963) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/personal-identity-like

## More from this book

> For over a decade now in the literature of social psychology there has been good work on stigma - the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance. This work has been added to from time to time by useful clinical studies, and its framework applied to ever new categories of persons.

p. 9 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/for-over-a-decade.md)

> It is to be expected that voluntary maintenance of various types of distance will be employed strategically by those who pass, the discreditable here using much the same devices as do the discredited, but for slightly different reasons. By declining or avoiding overtures of intimacy the individual can avoid the consequent obligation to divulge information. By keeping relationships distant he ensures that time will not have to be spent with the other, for, as already stated, the more time that is spent with another the more chance of unanticipated events that disclose secrets.

p. 122 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/it-is-to-be-expected.md)

> When there is a discrepancy between an individual's actual social identity and his virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normals contact him, or to be quite evident when he presents himself before us. He is a discredited person, and it is mainly he I have been dealing with until now.
>
> [...] However, when his differentness is not immediately apparent, and is not known beforehand, [...] he is a discreditable, not a discredited person [...]. The issue is [...] that of managing information about his failing. To display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie or not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when, and where.
>
> [...] It is this second general issue, the management of undisclosed discrediting information about self, that I am focusing on in these notes - in brief, 'passing'.

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/erving-goffman/stigma/when-there-is-a-discrepancy.md)