Osman Baydemir Quotes

There is no Kurdish problem.

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

My Kashubian family, like the Jews, are people who were born and live in border areas and were suspected by the Nazis and by the Communists of being disloyal.

Unfortunately, the attitude of many towards the press, humanitarians included and especially government workers, is often one of suspicion, if not outright fear.

Canada I don't trust. The Canadian government hates me more than the Japanese.

National sentiments can cause such sinful phenomena as aggressive nationalism, xenophobia, national exclusiveness and inter-ethnic enmity. At their extremes, these phenomena often lead to the restriction of the rights of individuals and nations, wars and other manifestations of violence

What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.

Italians must learn to be less sympathetic, to become hard, implacable, hateful masters

The West’s lopsided support for pro-Western nationalists in the former Soviet republics has encouraged those states to oppress their Russian-speaking populations—a problem to which Russia could not remain indifferent.

Ethno-nationalism - it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, eh, help crush it more.

As a Muslim woman, I'm all too familiar with the media shorthand for 'Muslim' and 'woman' equaling Covered in Black Muslim Woman. She's seen, never heard. Visible only in her invisibility under that black burka, niqab, chador, etc.

Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.

Actually, it doesn't matter to the papers why you left Glasgow. They never look at the roots of the problems you had, and you simply end up being painted as un-nationalistic.

Every progressive movement in U.S. history has been portrayed negatively by the media at the time it happened.

This is the greatest country under the sun. But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty, cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.

Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice; by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant; by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.

So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.

However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world today - human beings and Germans.

And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.

As a woman, I have no country

Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!

Race, Religion, Ethnic Pride, Nationalism does nothing but teach you how to hate people you have never met

It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.