James Clavell Quotes

You tend to be afraid when someone seems foreign to you. But if you aren't careful, that can lead to bigotry.

It is what people do not know that they persecute each other about.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

I navigate different cultures daily, and I understand how people can make false assumptions because of their lack of interaction with the cultures I find myself in. But if they don't frequent these spaces much, how can they rush to judgment?

If you're taught to hate and fear a people or a country, and it works, it's because of your ignorance of that country. You have no contact with it, nor do you know what you're hating and fearing.

As human beings, we always have resistance against things that are different and there's always suspicion.

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

I'm afraid of Americans.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

Seeing a man praying to Allah is enough for some people to assume he is a terrorist.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

We have the tendency to condemn what we don't understand.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays. Americans arrive at the border with skis in July, and straight people think that being gay is just a phase. A very long phase.

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

People look at me, and I dress a little unusually and they think, 'Oh you must be from California.' Of course, people in California think, 'Oh you must be from from Mars,' so, you know, your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.

China was not at all what I expected it to be. I had an image of China as a very quaint and mysterious and peaceful place. Well, it's quaint and mysterious in some respects, but not in the ways I had thought. The people are mysterious. They don't often tell you what they feel.

Immigrants themselves are largely responsible for any ill-feeling towards them, because they frequently contribute to prejudice and misunderstanding through their unawareness of Australian customs and standards.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

Those goddamn coons. They drive up and down Lake Shore Drive in front of my house. I hate them. I’m scared of them, and I think I’ll move to Switzerland where there just aren’t any.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don't like that.