“Two distinct ethnic groups, with quite different cultures and religious beliefs, were … put together in the same islands. Colonial policy largely kept them apart and there was, therefore, little assimilation. This racial separation and segregation became a defining feature of our country. The two communities have co-existed, without finding a sense of unified nationhood.”

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Laisenia Qarase57

Prime Minister of Fiji 1941

Pratap Singh Fijian politician

Fiji Day address, 10 October 2005

“This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions, and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted beneath the many social and political changes of the last two thousand years”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 31: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

“I believe a constitution can permit the co-existence of several cultures and ethnic groups with a single state.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

As quoted in Prime Ministers (2000) by Rennay Craats

“I believe many of our country's differences stem from the lack of genuine appreciation of the cultures and religious traditions and beliefs of our various communities.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpt from speech at Life Skills workshop, Valelevu Grounds, 22 May 2005

“For the Muslim, religion traditionally was not only universal but also central in the sense that it constituted the essential basis and focus of identity and loyalty. It was religion which distinguished those who belonged to the group and marked them off from those outside the group. A Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim Iraqi. Muslims of different countries, speaking different languages, share the same memories of a common and sacred past, the same awareness of corporate identity, the same sense of a common predicament and destiny. It is not nation or country which, as in the West, forms the historic basis of identity, but the religio-political community, and the imported Western idea of ethnic and territorial nationhood remains, like secularism, alien and incompletely assimilated.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

“Freedom of speech cannot be a reason to incite racial or cultural discrimination and tear society apart. We hope Sweden can earnestly respect the religious beliefs of minority groups, including Muslims.”

Wang Wenbin (1971) Chinese diplomat

Wang Wenbin (2022) cited in " Respect religious beliefs of Muslims, China tells Sweden https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220420-respect-religious-beliefs-of-muslims-china-tells-sweden/" on Middle East Monitor, 20 April 2022.

“In my view there can be no affirmative action without segregation-nor any end to the segregation if our names must be kept on separate lists. I'd like to propose instead a simple scenario: a fair job market where employment is commensurate with ability regardless of gender, racial or ethnic background. I make a pitch, they like my story, I get the job. Why not?”

Migdia Chinea Varela (1947) American actress, screenwriter, and TV personality

"My life as a 'Two-Fer' ", Newsweek, 26 December 1988, p. 25

“Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.”

Samuel P. Huntington book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity

Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), p. 12

“Hegemonic powers often use assimilation as a tool when they are confronted with defiant ethnic groups. Language and culture are also carriers of potential resistance, which can be desiccated by assimilation. banning the native language and enforcing the use of a foreign language are effective tools. People who are no longer able to speak their native language will no longer cherish its characteristic, which are rooted in ethnic, geographic and cultural factors. Without the unifying element of language the uniting quality of collective ideas also disappear.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), War and Peace in Kurdistan, p.10

“… we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“The Kindness of (Caucasian) Strangers” http://barelyablog.com/the-kindness-of-caucasian-stangers, Barely A Blog, January 31, 2014. <br class="br">2010s, 2014

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