Chris Bohjalian Quotes

In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.

I knew I couldn't live in America, and I wasn't ready to move to Europe, so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City... It was tolerant. It was a place that tolerated differences and could incorporate them and embrace them, which was what America was supposed to be about and wasn't.

I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.

The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.

What is certainly true is that the American people, just like the German people, just like the British and people around the world, are seeing extraordinarily rapid change. The world is shrinking, the economies have become much more integrated and demographics are shifting.

NEW YORK! I [love] U! You're OFFICIALLY the coolest place on the planet!

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture.

The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.

Nonviolence is the only way. Even if you achieve your goal by violent means there are always side effects, and these can be worse than the problem. Violence is against human nature.

I love New York City. I love that I get to live there and I love everything about it.

I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it's happening.

Any time you step forward, someone gets upset.

Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

The American people are both anxious for change. We're in a time of flux.

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control.

You can't put down anybody. You can just try and understand. The emphasis shouldn't be on revolution, it should be on communication. Because it's just going to get more uptight. The more the revolution goes on, and there will be a civil war sooner or later.

The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.

For peace do not hope; to be just you must break it. Still work for the minute and not for the year.

I wasn't born to be a fighter. The causes I have fought for have invariably been causes that should have been gained by a delicate suggestion. Since they never were, I made myself into a fighter.

Just as the world cannot live on wars, so people cannot on revolutions