Angelina Jolie Quotes

Oppressed strangers in our land…

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.

I don't want, under any circumstances, to see in 'Haaretz' a picture of a woman with a baby in her arms crying while policemen deport her.

Everybody kicks those who do not have a country of their own.

We cannot forget that we are a nation founded by refugees who were fleeing oppression and often fearful for their lives.

I was the child of refugees.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

I remember when we were in Egypt as refugees. It was tough, but there was always hope - hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.

They came to this country they, they were Hungarians, they were Communists from a Communist country. And right now those Hungarian freedom fighters can get jobs that student sit-ins can't get. They can go and sleep and live in hotels that Martin Luther King himself can't live in.They are recognized and respected because they are fighters, not because they are sit-iners or freedom.

This people [the Puritans], who in England could not bear being chastised with rods, had no sooner got free from their fetters than they scourged their fellow refugees [Quakers] with scorpions; though the absurdity, as well as the injustice of such a proceeding in them might stare them in the face!

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

The expulsion of the Jews will come from all of Palestine…. We will expel them.

Foreigners being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters can find asylum here [Cuba]. It does not matter if they speak English and were born in the United States.

Beyond fashion, I think that culture has a side where they love to shoot you up like a clay pigeon and then take out their rifles. I lived that, and I got to see the perspective from up in the sky.

My great-grandfather came here as a refugee from the pogrom in Ukraine.

I've identified all my life with refugees.

We are not going to turn our backs on people who have been persecuted, turn our backs on people who have been threatened by terror.

The brutality of apartheid drains you of that emotion of fear if you have gone through everything you can be put through in the process of harassment.

For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists.

I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.

As American Jews and descendants of immigrants, we never forget where our families came from or what members of our community experienced. Because we remember, we look out for those who are freeing persecution, oppression, and danger.

Sadly, I have very vague memories of Burma. The family was forced to leave when the generals took over.