Doris Lessing Quotes

IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT. Take It Or Leave It. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture…. We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society. Learn the language! …. If you aren't happy here then LEAVE. We didn't force you to come here. You asked to be here. So accept the country YOU accepted.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

I can cite a chapter and verse of literature at the times saying Italians don't speak our language, these folks coming from other places - it sounds identical to what you are saying about Muslims now. It really does.

Diversity means, when the left teaches it, the people responsible for building America and maintaining it get the short end of the stick from now on. With this singular American culture that people came and wanted to be part of, they were proud, couldn't wait to become Americans, tears in their eyes when it happened. It was a special place. Defending it now, defending that America, defending our cultural, defending our founding, defending all of the things that made this country great is now called racism or xenophobia or hate.

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

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

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans -- convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

It's the culture, not the blood. If you can go anywhere in the world and adopt these babies and put them into households that were already assimilated in America, those babies will grow up as American as any other baby with as much patriotism and love of country as any other baby. It's not about race. It's never been about race. In fact the struggles across this planet, we describe them as race, they're not race. They're culture based. It's a clash of culture, not the race. Sometimes that race is used as an identifier.

If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I'll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I'm in somebody else's homeland. So I'm going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean.

What I can't understand is why come here and try and change our country into the place that you've come from? And all I ask of people is come here, respect our country, respect our laws, our culture, our way of life. Be Australian, join us, enjoy this beautiful country and everything that it has to offer.

We have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. Sometimes it's just not going to work out.

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.

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

I've been in America for almost ten years. I've had many parts of the American experience. I've been all over this country and seen many different parts of it. It's just that I'm not an American. I've never become an American. I'm talking about the whole thing-psychologically, citizenship, the whole trip. Of course I've definitely been influenced by America-I'm definitely influenced by the music and the culture.

In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the United States are composed of a combination of different groups with different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young.

Before the United States, there wasn't really anyplace anybody could go. They had to seek refuge in other ways. After the United States was founded, it became the place you go, and the people who came assimilated into a single culture that was shared in a way. Everything the left claims to want is exactly what this country started out doing. It was multicultural, we had the Italians, we had the Irish, we had everybody.

No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.

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.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.