Ted Lieu Quotes

People tell me to go back to my country, and I'm an American.

We are Americans when we go to war, and when we return, we are Mexicans.

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.’

Most of the discrimination I have encountered centered on the view that I am not a part of this great nation, even though I grew up in Ohio, graduated from law school in Washington, D.C., and received my commission in the U.S. Air Force in 1991.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

I am, as a European, absolutely shocked by European people. I am also shocked by European nationalist people. They have allowed themselves to be so emasculated so silently.

When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

All nationalism is based on racism and hate. I'm Scottish; I was born in Scotland, as my parents, as my grandparents.

We are letting the Mexicans and blacks wreck our country today not because the blacks or the Mexicans are able to brainwash us but because the Jews are. Mexicans are not a menace to us because they breed fast and carry switchblades. Blacks are not a menace because there are a lot of them and they have a tendency toward violence. We know how to deal with people who breed fast and carry switchblades. We know how to deal with violent blacks, no matter how many of them there are. Cleaning up America might be a bit messy, but there's absolutely no question about our ability to do it, if we had the will to do it.

Patriotism is a sham when it lets out the howl that the people of another nation are a pack of beasts and criminals, unrelated to the human family

A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won't change it.

The bitter and agonizing fruit from the tree of nationality…

America must be kept American

I don't like it when I see a racist comedian go up and say, 'What are we gonna do about all these immigrants?' and they get a round the applause. I think, 'Well that's not a joke. That's just your biased opinion.'

When people today say 'racism,' they mean it's a nationalism they don't like. Racialism used to be a good thing, a looking-out for what was best for one group... Israel comes out of that 19th-century idea of nationalism. Many Arab states also have preferences. It's fundamentally unfair to decide that one is racism and the others aren't.

I was racially discriminated against for years as a child in Leeds because I was an Italian.

I've been told to go back to my country so many times, I can't even count.

A lot of people forget that Americans are immigrants. People are forgetting that, to where people have this attitude, 'We're Americans, go back to your country. Go back. This is a free country.' I always heard that growing up. I always heard that.

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

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

There are a lot of people in Beverly Hills who come from the Middle East, who are very much a part of the Beverly Hills fabric, and their kids grew up with the privileges of Beverly Hills. And yet they still have to deal with a lot of the prejudice against them for being foreign-born.

Sometimes the British press is maybe a little bit racist.