Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

Welcome to the brave new world of American multiculturalism. From a nation of diverse peoples united by a common culture, we have become a people divided by a common malady.

The demonization of Islam and immigrants shows that perception of difference remains one of our biggest problems, and maybe always will be for a species that began in small groups competing with other groups for resources. These apparently competing forces for sameness and difference sometimes even seem to be mutually reinforcing. The homogenizing force of globalization tends to make many people feel they are on the losing side, economically and culturally, and it is they who are most easily turned against those "others" who are demonized by demagogues.

Multiculturalism, if its logic is fully played out, is the ideology of national suicide.

I do believe, separate and apart from any particular election or movement, that we are going to have to guard against a rise in a crude sort of nationalism or ethnic identity or tribalism that is built around an us and a them.

If the immigrant is responsible for assimilation of the country, and some of these people are in fact are born there. But if you find it unwelcoming to your own barbaric notions of equality, that is not on the country, that is on you. If you leave a horrible place, please leave your horrible practices behind.

You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church. These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

I never would like to be a country that is that multicultural that, for instance, the Islamic values become more dominant. We should not do that. We should stop that.

Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.

I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

As globalization proceeds, tribalism increases.

The country is the people.

The bitter and agonizing fruit from the tree of nationality…

Britishness has got to be the foundation of the multicultural society in this country. Anything less than this is farcical and treacherous.

The question whether nationalism, patriotism, the love of the homeland, is beneficial either to the individual or to the human race as a whole is open to discussion. It might be a much better world if this instinct were eradicated. On the other hand, it might be worse. The fact is that the instinct exists, and that, far from losing its grip on us, on all of us, it is becoming constantly more intense, more exacting, more all-embracing…. Nationalism as we know it may pass, but for the moment it is more powerful than any other idea or even than any religion.

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

I think it's important to be reminded that that's what this country is comprised of - people from other countries.

Where liberals see as an ever-more-splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel. Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.

Anybody that believes that a country can be maintained that has no ethnic core to it or no linguistic core to it, I believe, is naive in the extreme.

Everybody has a love/hate relationship with their own country.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s, which have emphasized difference at the expense of shared national identity.

The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.