Jonas Gahr Store Quotes

I think integration in Norway is, by all standards, going relatively well. People are working, taking education, learning the language.

Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting.

Being a foreigner is not a disease.

In this country, it doesn't make any difference where you were born. It doesn't make any difference who your parents were. It doesn't make any difference if, like me, you couldn't even speak English until you were in your twenties.

As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

Efforts to concentrate immigrants in social groups and to retard their Americanization should be steadily frowned down.

There was no question of the racial superiority of northwestern Europeans or of the racial inferiority of southeastern Europeans. It was simply a question as to which of these two groups of aliens is, as a whole, best fitted by tradition, political background, customs, education, and habits of thought to adjust itself to American institutions and to American social and economic conditions--to become, in short, an adaptable, homogeneous and helpful element in American national life.

There is nothing more important for us in Maine than to welcome immigrants and help them not only become part of our community but for us to become part of their communities.

I love working with newcomers.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.

Well, I think it's real important that people understand, first and foremost, those of us that have lived in Arizona or in southern California, we have a very diverse population. The Hispanic population has been part of all of our lives since we've been born here or since we've grown up here.

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

We are the only country in the world that has taken people from so many different backgrounds, which is a great achievement by itself, but an even greater achievement is that we have turned all of that variety and diversity into unity.

America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.

I think there is a problem in France that anyone who is not European, you want to know where they come from and why do they come from somewhere or why they speak English or why they are human. That's the big barrier for all of us that are coming from some far, far away countries. But at the end of the day, we are all artists.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.

You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?

America's a melting pot, all races, cultures, religious choices.

Our first challenge in America today is simply to open our eyes to these changes, to discover America anew, and to explore the many ways in which the new immigration has changed the religious landscape of our cities and towns, our neighborhoods and schools.

As to other foreigners it is thought better to discourage their settling together in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits, and principles of government, and that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation.