"Once you label me, you negate me"---Soren Kierkegard

[Atticus]

I will begin by confessing that, while using labels is almost unavoidable, I have often done so without considering if it is fair with regard to the person I am labeling.

Not all "liberals" hate guns.

Not all "conservatives" support "concealed or open carry".

These and other labels trigger various assumptions about those we use them for whether we actually know all of that person's views and opinions or not.

I will leave it to others to think of the many other labels we use if they bother to consider Kierkegard's wisdom.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

1. I've had coworkers who clearly liked me UNTIL...

... they asked about my political beliefs and they learned that I was a liberal.

Despite me being helpful and kind to them, it was all quickly forgotten because I was now an evil liberal in their minds.

Same thing can happen in just about any large tribal structures, like various religions.*

* Which reminds me... there were two Muslim students from the Middle East in one of my college statistics classes years ago. (That was many years before 9/11, by the way, not that it matters.) We tended to arrive early for that class, and that's when we'd talk.
They started bad-mouthing Israel and Jews to me eventually, and I continued to behave politely despite how I didn't agree with them. Then they eventually said that Muslims like them and Christians like me were more alike than the Jews (??), and that's when I corrected them. They stared at me for awhile and asked if I was a Jew?! I replied that I wasn't part of any religion since I was an atheist who never saw evidence of any God. After that, they both stopped talking to me... for the remainder of the quarter! (I later learned that many Muslims believe that belief in no God was the absolute worst, in their minds.)

[rownesheck]

2. Wait. Was it Kierkegard

who said that, or was it Dick van Patten?

Sorry, that was from the Wayne's World movie. I couldn't resist.

[Igel]

3. Since the earliest attestation attributing it to Kierkegaard is apparently 1976,

Odds are it was van Patten.

The 1976 quote didn't actually give a citation for the question. Just that Kierkegaard penned it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. attribution is disputed

because there is no definite piece of writing it seems to be from:

Disputed
Once you label me you negate me.
As attributed in Journal of Marriage and Family Counseling, Vol. 2 (1976) by American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, p. 33; no earlier incidents have been located.
Variants:
When you label me, you negate me.
As attributed in Inner Joy (1985) by Kory Bloomfield, p 169
I have needed God every day to defend myself against the abundance of thoughts.
PV, p. 73; SV1, XIII, p. 559; Jon Bartley Stewart. 2008. Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker. Museum Tusculanum Press.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

The earliest phrasing I can find comes from a 1945 article by Jean Wahl in [The New Republic] (https://books.google.com/books?id=5TUQAAAAIAAJ&q=kierkegaard+%22negate+me%22&dq=kierkegaard+%22negate+me%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAmoVChMI7-vutdOJxwIVAcuACh0hogVY) called "Existentialism: A Preface" [(full text here)] (http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/existentialism-preface)

One day a man, Kierkegaard, was deeply dissatisfied with the ideas of Hegel. Hegel had shown that the truth is the whole, be it in art, in society, in history, and that beyond the particular wholes, there is the absolute whole which contains everything. But Kierkegaard said: “I am no part of a whole, I am not integrated, not included. To put me in this whole you imagine is to negate me. Who am I? I am an intensity of feeling in relation with beings, and particularly with the Divine Being, who excites my desire, my knowledge. I want to be in a kind of self-destroying contact with God, the Absolute Other.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3fh9u2/did_kierkegaard_really_say_if_you_label_me_you/

It could be a translation issue, of course. But "you negate me" sounds rather modern.