Hasan Minhaj Quotes

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

It's weird for minorities even just to buy tickets to the ballet. We feel like it's not a part of our lives and we're not a part of that world.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

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

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

By virtue of my traditions, and my community, I worked hard to ensure that I was accepted as part of the traditional family of America.

I don't think you lose culture because you act different cultures.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

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.

I made some flippant remark about not wanting my son to grow up with an American accent, and the next thing I knew, there were people in America suggesting I head back to Britain if I was unhappy at such a prospect.

Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.

I think that every minority in the United States of America knows everything about the dominant culture. From the time you can think, you are bombarded with images from TV, film, magazines, newspapers.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

I knew I was Chinese, but growing up, it never occurred to me that that had any particular implication or that it should differentiate me in any way. I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair.

I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.

The assimilationist movement is running us into the ground.

I didn't just grow up in one environment, so it was easy for me, as a child, just to imitate and just be all these different people.