Louis D. Brandeis Quotes

A common language is critical to cohesion and national identity in an ethnically diverse society

We are Englishmen; that is one good fact.

America is an archipelago of tribes, a land where people form national families of kindred spirits.

Our cultural diversity has most certainly shaped our national character.

The country is the people.

One of these days every person in Canada will be a Canadian.

Nationality is belief in a common origin and end.

Our nation's multiculturalism is what makes us so special as a nation.

You can't let the debate of the day mask the fact that Canadians care deeply in their country. Including Quebecers - from all origins and language. Quebecers care deeply about their country. The idea of Canada and its unity is not something that is set in stone forever, or that is solved. We need to always work towards building this country.

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.

I'll be a Quebecker-Canadian. I'm from Quebec, and every time I go to a country, I say that. It's my roots, my origins, and it's the most important thing to me.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.

I've been marching in every single ethnic nationality parade all throughout the City of New York. We're all Americans first and foremost, but people understand their heritage and it's good to see.

From the newest arrivals to our Native American brothers and sisters, we are one America.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

Diversity is what is destroying the country.

A nation is the totality of people who speak the same language.

A Canadian nationality—not French-Canadian, not British-Canadian, nor Irish-Canadian: patriotism rejects the prefix ... is what we should look forward to.

We [French Canadians] may not assimilate, we may not blend, but for all that we are still the component parts of the same country.

… mongrel nation

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans