Jack Ma Quotes

When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

You start thinking the world is a certain way and forgetting that there's another world outside of the campus boundaries that has nothing to do with what is your world at the time.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

My mom's Brazilian, so she and I definitely grew up with different perspectives. I was born in America, and she's from Brazil, so we have different ways of doing things. There's a bit of culture clash there.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

There are a lot of things that immigrants, especially Chinese-Americans, want to share with their children, but there are a lot of things they don't want to share.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.

The mind God is looking for in man is a doubting, questioning mind, not a dogmatic mind; dogmatic reasoning is wrong reasoning. Dogmatic reason ties a huge rock to a man’s foot and stops him forever from advancing.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.

I have this internal cultural struggle where there's a side of me that is very Brazilian that misses the food and culture, and a side of me that's very American that really loves the structure and predictability here.

My father sort of relented. He saw Rajiv, and he said he is a good man. But his more worried about his daughter, because I was going far to a place completely different... with completely different customs. He felt that perhaps I would not be able to accustom to these new ways.

I didn't realize how interesting the place I come from is until I left home and saw how other cultures handled things differently.

When I came to America, I had some surprises at first, but I could soon adjust.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

I used to think being in the West would be incredible and then when I was nine my parents moved us to Belfast. I was initially amazed by little things - in toyshops you could actually play with the toys, the schools were more colourful and there were so many magazines everywhere.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

I didn't fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive, I created this 'ideal America.' Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, 'Oh, I don't belong here, either.'

If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.

Some people don't have an open mind, and when I was traveling to different places I think I found it hard to enjoy things. You know, I come from a great city where there are lots of things happening, and if you end up in a small town where you don't have all those things you can feel the difference. Somewhere along the way, though, I think I learned to appreciate the difference.