Saint Patrick Quotes

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, "I have the right to hold onto my culture," and that's what makes it difficult.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

The customs of the [Khmer] barbarians are so different from our own that even if we were to capture all their territory, it would not be certain that we could change them.

We need to preserve our cultural peculiarities; however, going to the extreme would lead to cultural isolation

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

Immigrants have to adopt our values, not the other way around.

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

I never felt particularly alienated as an English person in America. It doesn't feel culturally like a massive gap to me.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

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

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal.

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

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.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

There is a simple maxim that I use to express this situation, 'when tolerance becomes a one way street, it leads to cultural suicide.'

I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. - is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

There's a lot of us who do not accept the culture of the bubbles.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades