Margaret Thatcher Quotes

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

There is less and less of France abroad, and more that is foreign in France.

America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.

Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting.

There is room enough in this country for one great free people; but there's not room enough, under the same flag and the same laws, for two or three angry, suspicious, obstructive "nationalities.

We have too many foreigners in France. Diversity is not working.

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.

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture...

In other countries, being from somewhere else is celebrated. But not in America.

Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

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.

For the tidal wave of new immigrants Canada is more a land for the realization of private dreams than for maintaining a ... compact between founding races. No common identity was provided for the millions of new Canadian immigrants other than a week vision of mutual multi-cultural indifference.

Traditionally, the ideology of the United States nationhood perpetuated the myth that immigrants would shed their particularistic ethnic identities and loyalties. Eventually these “strangers” would be assimilated into a homogeneous body politic that was based on the equality of individual rights.

There is no such thing as National character or National Sentiment. The Inhabitants are from all quarters of the globe; and as various in their opinions, projects and schemes, as their manners and habits are from their early education.

The melting pot was always a tension between difference and sameness.

New Americans are not to be feared as strangers. They are to be welcomed as neighbors.

Our nation has been called a melting pot. I think of it more as a mosaic, one to which many groups make their own distinct contributions.

The Jews must be refused everything as a separate nation, and be granted everything as individuals.... There cannot be a nation within a nation.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

… mongrel nation

This is a country where Jews and Arabs speak without fear. Where people come from different cultures the world over. Where everyone becomes Brazilian rapidly.

Are we going to permit uncontrolled nationalism to dominate civilized Europe…?

Part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shore.