Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

What we want in this country is not Jews who can successfully keep up their Jewishness in a few large ghettos, but men and women who have grown up in freedom and can assert themselves wherever they are. A parochial system of education among the Jews would be fatal to such hopes.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

With faith and courage, generations of Armenians have overcome great suffering and proudly preserved their culture, traditions, and religion and have told the story of the genocide to an often indifferent world.

The Jews' fear of assimilation and intermarriage should not replace fear of anti-Semitism.

The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.

I think that Jews - because they are a distinct, gifted and successful group that differentiates itself from societies in which it lives - are vulnerable wherever the rule of law is not paramount.

Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.

My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.

The Sami, as an indigenous people, as well as the Roma and other groups, have the right to maintain and develop their own language and culture.

It is not within the competence of the public authorities to determine culture. Their function is to promote and protect the cultural life of everyone, including that of minorities.

We fully understand that even in our own lands we’re now a minority, but that doesn’t in any way mean we should rescind our efforts to deal with the pain of alcohol abuse in those lands.

It is absolutely necessary to tell the world both inside and outside India that the economic problem is not the only problem in the country. From the Muslim point of view the cultural problem is of much greater consequence

… we have learned to live securely, in peace and mutual prosperity among our Asian and Pacific neighbors. We will not be cut off from our British and European cultures and traditions or from those economies. On the contrary, the more engaged we are economically and politically with the region around us, the more value and relevance we bring to those old relationships. Far from putting our identity at risk, our relationships with the region will energize it.

We sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the nations in which we lived seeking just to preserve the faith, the religion of our fathers but this has not been allowed to us.

In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful grassroots responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right from the beginning, where Occupy Sandy was very strong, where new networks emerged.

The state should say that there is place to maintain the Jewish majority even if it violates rights.

We were, as Arabs in Israel, educated not to leave our villages, in order to protect our identity.

We, as Palestinian-Americans... will not change who we are to make anyone comfortable.

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Mark you, if you give up spirituality, leaving it aside to go after the materializing civilization of the West, the result will be that in three generations you will be an extinct race; because the backbone of the nation will be broken, the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built will be undermined, and the result will be annihilation all round.

The larger society has to recognize some degree of autonomy for the minority: the right to practice their own religion and way of life and to some extent their language.

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.

A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask 'Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?' Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!

With the full realization that, in order to earn for ourselves any place in the sun, we must with perseverance and self-discipline work collectively for the full first-class citizenship participation of Minorities everywhere, including ourselves.