Quotes about foreigner
page 11

“Some Republicans are not going to want to hear this, but I live near Fort Campbell, and there are 50,000 soldiers there. I tell people you have to truly imagine what your feelings would be if those soldiers were Chinese soldiers and they were occupying the United States. We wouldn't have it. Republican and Democrat, we'd be blowing up the Chinese with roadside bombs as they were coming off the base. No country wants foreign soldiers on their land.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

Campaign rally for Ron Paul, 2008-01-31
on US forces in Iraq
2000s

People, Feeling, Imagination, Country

“But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say “comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Story Hearer"

Pleasure, Thinking

“It's a good thing a lot of people speak foreign languages, otherwise those people would have no one to talk to.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)

People

“The trial can only end in a mistake because it is founded on one. How can a foreign court try a sovereign government of another country? Could we have tried your President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary Henry Morgenthau, or Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, if we had won the war? We could not have done so and would not have. And trying that went on would have to be done by the nation itself and the courts set up there.”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

To Leon Goldensohn, May 2, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

War, Country

“We all possess, in our unconscious minds, a kind of servant who performs certain automatic functions. When I learn to type or drive a car or learn a foreign language, I have to do it painfully and consciously; then, suddenly, my robot takes over and does it automatically; in fact, he does it far more quickly and efficiently than "I" could. The main trouble with this mechanical valet is that he often takes over functions I would prefer to keep for myself -- for example, when I am tired I eat "automatically," and so do not enjoy my food. In fact, this is the reason that so much of our experience seems oddly "unreal"; the robot has taken it over. When I am feeling low, I may live for whole days in a "robotic" state, so that experience flows off me like water off a duck's back. And because I am not receiving any "feedback" of pleasure or interest from my activities, I become duller than ever, and experience becomes progressively less interesting. (This is, of course, the mechanism of depression and nervous breakdown.) And this is also why explorers deliberately seek out hardship and danger -- to cheat the robot and "feel the life in them more intensely."”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 89

Life, Pleasure, Food, Cars

“My foreign policy has three fundamental branches: first, confidence in our cause, a recognition that the principles America was based upon are not something we shrink from or apologize for, that we stand for those principles; the second is clarity in our purpose, which is that when we have a foreign policy objective, we describe it honestly and clearly to the American people, to Congress and to the people of the world; and number three is resolve in our might, that in those rare circumstances, those rare circumstances where we decide it's essential for us to apply military might, that we do so with overwhelming force, that we do so in the clarity of a mission, understanding the nature of the U. S. interest involved, understanding when the mission would be complete, what will be left when it is -- what will be left behind us when that mission has been -- has been terminated.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

televised remarks, , quoted in * 2012-09-12
What They Said, Before and After the Attack in Libya
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/12/us/politics/libya-statements.html
2012-09-18
2012

People, World, Confidence, Understanding

“The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Original French: La plus extravagante idée qui puisse naître dans la tête d'un politique est de croire qu'il suffise à un peuple d'entrer à main armée chez un peuple étranger, pour lui faire adopter ses lois et sa constitution. Personne n'aime les missionnaires armés; et le premier conseil que donnent la nature et la prudence, c'est de les repousser comme des ennemis.
Sur la guerre (1ère intervention), a speech to the Jacobin Club (2 January 1792)

Love, People, Law, Idea

“I may not be the expert as some people on foreign policy, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Huckabee Says What His Opponents Won’t
Niall
Stanage
2007-12-18
http://www.observer.com/2007/huckabee-says-what-his-opponents-won-t
New York Observer
2007-12-15

People, Holiday, Night

“[The corporation is an invaluable auxiliary to the conduct of foreign affairs by the Government, and] has become an international as well as a national instrument. It is a mighty institution which thus far has not become, and has manifested no great desire to become, an independent political force. In international life it is an experiment in non-national organization, pledged only to discharge certain economic functions.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

163 ; as cited in Prashker (1954)
The 20th century capitalist revolution. 1954

Life

“While we are thus desirous of the economic welfare of other countries in part because of its relation to world peace, we ought to remember that our own Government owes a great duty to the American people in this direction. It is for this reason in part that I have insisted upon a policy of constructive economy in the national administration. If we can make the circumstances of the people easy, if we can relieve them of the burden of heavy taxation, we shall have contributed to that contentment and peace of mind which will go far to render them immune from any envious inclination toward other countries. If the people prosper in their business, they will be the less likely to resort to the irritating methods of competition in foreign trade out of which arise mutual misunderstandings and animosities. They will not be driven to the employment of sharp practices in order to support and maintain their own position. Being amply supplied with their own resources, they will not be so inclined to turn covetous eyes toward the resources of other nations.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

People, World, Peace, Business

“The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

People, Truth, Way

“[I]f you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to [participate]. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon you tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign agreement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into the issue that any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Love, People, Truth, Faith

“Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments.For mapped onto each body is love.Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land”

Ingrid de Kok (1951) South African writer

"Body maps," http://www.oulitnet.co.za/multimedia/vonkverse_ingrid2.asp from Seasonal Fires: Selected and New Poems (2006), a contribution for the WikiAfrica Literature Project.

Love, Age, Country

“I've heard over and over that people don't vote on the basis of foreign policy.”

John R. Bolton (1948) American lawyer and diplomat

"The Man with the Mustache"

People

“I would have these good people to recollect, that the laws of this country hold out to foreigners an offer of all that liberty of the press which Americans enjoy, and that, if this liberty be abridged, by whatever means it may be done, the laws and the constitution, and all together, is a mere cheat; a snare to catch the credulous and enthusiastic of every other nation; a downright imposition on the world.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Source: Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 59.

People, World, Law, Cheating

“The success of the missions need not have been so meagre but for certain factors which may be discussed now. In the first place, the missionary brought with him an attitude of moral superiority and a belief in his own exclusive righteousness. The doctrine of the monopoly of truth and revelation, as claimed by William of Aubruck to Batu Khan when he said 'he that believeth not shall be condemned by God', is alien to the Hindu and Buddhist mind. To them the claim of any sect that it alone possesses the truth and others shall be `condemned' has always seemed unreasonable. Secondly the association of Christian missionary work with aggressive imperialism introduced political complications. National sentiment could not fail to look upon missionary activity as inimical to the country's interests. That diplomatic pressure, extra‑territoriality and sometimes support of gun‑boats had been resorted to in the interests of the foreign missionaries could not be easily forgotten. Thirdly, the sense of European superiority which the missionaries perhaps unconsciously inculcated produced also its reaction. Even during the days of unchallenged European political supremacy no Asian people accepted the cultural superiority of the West. The educational activities of the missionaries stressing the glories of European culture only led to the identification of the work of the missions with Western cultural aggression.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

God, People, Truth, Education

“The foreign policy of the United States in the decades ahead may prove to be the deciding factor in determining whether or not militant nationalism, aggressive imperialism and international anarchy, are to lead to further wars, or whether an era of international peace shall be ushered in by outlawing war and by creating effective social machinery through which a new and higher conception of nationalism may find expression.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

An American Peace Policy (1925)

War, Peace

“Being a bourgeoisie in a colonial and semi-colonial country and oppressed by imperialism, the Chinese national bourgeoisie retains a certain revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree--even in the era of imperialism--in its opposition to the foreign imperialists and the domestic governments of bureaucrats and warlords (instances of opposition to the latter can be found in the periods of the Revolution of 1911 and the Northern Expedition), and it may ally itself with the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie against such enemies as it is ready to oppose. In this respect the Chinese bourgeoisie differs from the bourgeoisie of old tsarist Russia. Since tsarist Russia was a military-feudal imperialism which carried on aggression against other countries, the Russian bourgeoisie was entirely lacking in revolutionary quality. There, the task of the proletariat was to oppose the bourgeoisie, not to unite with it. But China's national bourgeoisie has a revolutionary quality at certain periods and to a certain degree, because China is a colonial and semi-colonial country which is a victim of aggression. Here, the task of the proletariat is to form a united front with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism and the bureaucrat and warlord governments without overlooking its revolutionary quality.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On New Democracy (1940)

Country

“Effective foreign policymaking requires an understanding of not only international and transnational systems, but also the intricacies of domestic politics in multiple countries. It also demands recognition of just how little is known about “building nations,” particularly after revolutions – a process that should be viewed in terms of decades, not years.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

"Obama the Pragmatist" http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/joseph-s--nye-defends-obama-s-approach-to-foreign-policy-against-critics-calling-for-a-more-muscular-approach, Project Syndicate (June 10, 2014).

Understanding, Country

“The left should carve out a new long-term narrative about British foreign policy: one that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage again. And one that reasserts our commitment to the responsibility to protect those most at risk of mass atrocity crimes. This isn’t really about being pro or anti-military intervention. Rather it’s a call to redefine the principles that will guide the decisions we take, as well as a commitment to then honour them.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Decision

“I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese.”

Xiaolu Guo (1973) Chinese-British novelist and film director

Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatto & Windus, 2017, page 259 (ISBN 9781784740689).
Memoir, 2017

Life, Communication, Study

“Muhammad bin Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving captives, and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide… Ibn Battuta’s eye-witness account of the Sultan’s arranging marriages of enslaved girls with Muslims on a large scale on the two Ids confirms the statement of Al Umri. “First of all,” writes he, “daughters of Kafir (Hindu) Rajas captured during the course of the year, come, sing and dance. Thereafter they are bestowed upon Amirs and important foreigners. After this the daughters of other Kafirs dance and sing… the Sultan gives them to his brothers, relatives sons of Maliks etc. On the sixth day male and female slaves are married.” It was a general practice for Hindu girls of good families to learn the art of dancing. It was a sort of religious rite. They used to dance during weddings, festivals and Pujas at home and in temples. This art was turned ravenous under their Muslim captors or buyers.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Masalik-ul-Absar, E and D, III, p. 580. Ibn Battuta, p. 63, Hindi version by S.A.A. Rizvi in Tughlaq Kalin Bharat, Part I, Aligarh, p. 189. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7

Marriage, Family, Art, Home

“The aim of this book is to try to explain to top management of America that their job is to improve competitive position. One need not be an economist to understand from the papers that many American products are not competitive at home or abroad, lost to foreign invasion, causing unemployment at home. Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has nurtured waste of manpower, of materials and of machine time, all of which raise the manufacturers costs and the price the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, (1982), p. i; Preface

Books, Home, Failure, Understanding

“We lost -- we lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties -- and Sen. Obama -- passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles. We're going to change that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

People, Change, Dependency

“Amartya Sen is not Indian. He had lost his Indian-ness after he left his Bengali ex-wife and married two foreign females. He has lived abroad and only visits the country for a couple of months, which cannot make you Indian.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Subramanian Swamy, "Sen 'lost Indian-ness' after dumping Bengali wife for foreign brides: Swamy" http://www.business-standard.com/article/politics/sen-lost-indian-ness-after-dumping-bengali-wife-for-foreign-brides-swamy-113072300490_1.html#.Ue8bEFEgKO4.twitter, Business Standard (23 July 2013)

Country

“All alone in a foreign land,
I am twice as homesick on this day
When brothers carry dogwood up the mountain,
Each of them a branch—and my branch missing.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"On the Mountain Holiday Thinking of My Brothers in Shan-tung" (九月九日忆山东兄弟), trans. Witter Bynner
Variant translation:
To be a stranger in a strange land:
Whenever one feasts, one thinks of one's brother twice as much as before.
There where my brother far away is ascending,
The dogwood is flowering, and a man is missed.
"Thinking of My Brother in Shantung on the Ninth Day of the Ninth Moon", in The White Pony, ed. Robert Payne

Mountain

“I don't mean that it is important whether a few of us like Goering, myself, or the others are sentenced to death or hard labor or whatever, but to the German people we will always remain their leaders, right or wrong, and in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust and will consider us martyrs.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, June 23, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Death, Hate, War, People

“I see evidence of my own racist brainwashing when exploring the landscape of current foreign policy.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

about North Korea
From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, MENTAL COLONIZATION

“A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 77)

People, Fear

“America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Freedom vs. Security: A False Choice
2004-05-31
http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2004/tst053104.htm
2000s, 2001-2005

Men, Freedom

“Bullets and machine guns capable of daunting Duvalier do not exist. They cannot touch me… I am already an immaterial being. No foreigner is going to tell me what to do! If the OAS claims the right to intervene because of repressive conditions, why don't they land troops in Alabama?”

François Duvalier (1907–1971) 40th President of the Republic of Haiti

Quoted in Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: An insider's history of the rise and fall of the Duvaliers (1988), p. 111.

“There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the substance; 'tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it. God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection, cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him, forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name, which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us. Thus is it that to God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having continual need of amelioration, 'tis to that we ought to employ all our endeavour.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 16
Essais (1595), Book II

God, Parting, Perfection

“Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce… the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

p, 125
The Morals of Economic Irrationalism (1920)

Support

“When the U. S. is an active participant in a foreign war, what comes with that is an increased responsibility to try to rescue civilians from the harm done in part by U. S. munitions and U. S. targeting.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"Do Liberals Have an Answer to Trump on Foreign Policy?" (March 2017)

War, Parting

“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness… Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality

World, Way, Feeling, Idea

“In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.”

Roman Polanski (1933) Polish-French film director, producer, writer, actor, and rapist

Polanski : His Life and Films (1982)

Cars

“Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians. They eat soul food, they party with black women, they play the saxophone, but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy, they make the same decisions that are destructive to African people in this country and throughout the world.”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

The Today show (16 June 1992)

Women, People, World, Food

“During Muslim rule in India, foreign and Indian Muslims were freely bestowed jobs and gifts. Foreign Muslims were most welcome here. They came in large numbers and were well provided for. Muhammad Tughlaq was specially kind to them, as averred by Ibn Battutah. He writes that "the countries contiguous to India like Yemen, Khurasan and Fars are filled with anecdotes about… his generosity to the foreigners in so far as he prefers them to the Indians, honours them, confers on them great favours and makes them rich presents and appoints them to high offices and awards them great benefits". He calls them aziz or dear ones and has instructed his courtiers not to address them as foreigners. 'The sultan ordered for me," writes Ibn Battutah, "a sum of six thousand tankahs, and ordered a sum of ten thousand for Ibn Qazi Misr. Similarly, he ordered sums to be given to all foreigners (a'izza) who were to stay at Delhi, but nothing was given to the metropolitans."… There are scores of instances of Muhammad Tughlaq's generosity to foreigners…. The point to note here is that under Sultan Muhammad so much wealth was awarded to so many deserving and undeserving foreign Muslims that at the close of his reign the Delhi treasury had become bankrupt. There was also the loss of popularity because "the people of India hate the foreigners (Persians, Turks, Khurasanis) because of the favour the sultan shows them."”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Ibn Battutah, trs. Mahdi Husain, p. 105-140. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5

Hate, People, Loss, Country

“The whole system of the Foreign Enlistment Act is, I may add, only 200 years old. The ancients did not know the meaning of the word "neutrality" as we know it at the present day. In the Middle Ages people were hardly aware of such a thing as neutrality; the first Foreign Enlistment Act is hardly 200 years old, and since that time that system of legislation has grown up. It has been a code of legislation that has gradually grown up, and is now looked to by the nations to assist in keeping the peace and preventing the catastrophe of a general war. Shall we be the first to roll back the tide of civilization, and thus practically go back to barbarism and the Middle Ages, by virtually repealing this international code by which we preserve the rights and interests of neutrality? I cannot but think that this House and the country, when they reflect on the facts of the case, will consider that if they in any way lend their sanction to such a retrograde policy, they would be unworthy of themselves, and would be guilty of a great crime against humanity.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1863/apr/24/observations in the House of Commons (24 April 1863). 1860s

War, People, Age, Peace

“At one time, I was an actor in the conduct of foreign policy. I became convinced that I was accomplishing nothing in that capacity, that the problems were deeper, that the answer lay in a direct approach to the public and in an effort to explain to the public what it was really about. Today, even that seems futile. Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. There is nothing that can be done about it. To correct this, you would have to educate the educators. I must say that I have lost all confidence in the freedom of the mass media. The fact of the matter is that in this country McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

April 17, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

Education, Error, Confidence, Intelligence

“I like to take things easy. I don't constantly think about music. I never plan concerts, practise or even hum. When I go up on the stage, music courses through me. My family members attend my concerts because they do not hear me sing at home. I have entrusted you [Prince Rama Varma] with the task of popularising my style of singing among others, especially in foreign countries. I have heard some of your foreign students sing my compositions and was surprised. They sound better than many Indian students. I want to be known more as a composer than as a musician. You are now making this happen.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Interview by Prince Rama Varma "There's no one way to teach".

Family, Music, Home, Thinking

“When rent in twain, British Abolition, which in fanaticism and sacrificial spirit, far exceeds that of the North (for it has been willing to pay for its fanaticism, a thing the North never will do), will have none of the impediments in its path, now to be found. England will no longer fear the power of the mighty nation which twice has humbled her, and whose giant arm would, so long as we are united, be stretched forth to protect the weakest State, or the most obscure citizen. The State that secedes, when pressed by insidious arts of abolition emissaries, supported by foreign powers, when cursed by internal disorders and insurrections, can lay no claim to that national flag, which when now unfurled, ensures the respect of all nations and strikes terror to the hearts of those who would invade our rights.”

Sam Houston (1793–1863) nineteenth-century American statesman, politician, and soldier, namesake of Houston, Texas

1860s, Speech in Austin (1860)

Fear, Art, Support, Heart

“Of course I have nothing to do with racism and xenophobia, and I have my life-story to prove it. Given the democratic slump in Europe, I am convinced that a measured and carefully monitored immigration is necessary. My hometown is host to people from every country, and I have a lot of foreign friends, mostly Indian and Chinese. So, I am not at all against immigrants, and I have personally helped some to integrate or to get naturalized as citizens of my country. But my criticism of Islam stands: Islam is intrinsically separatist and hostile to neighbour communities.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Life, Hostility, People, Communication

“A corporate raid on a country is not foreign investment. It's just a corporate raid. A corporate raid doesn't expand our wealth, our employment, our exports, is not advantageous to most economies and most economies understand that. In New Zealand we did not. Everything that came from overseas was regarded as foreign investment, when, in fact, it was often a downsizing of the operation, a break-up of the operation and a mass of sackings.”

Winston Peters (1945) New Zealand politician

Interview with the 7:30 Report, ABC TV, Australia.

Understanding, Country, Wealth

“Those Englishmen who are taunted with following the methods of the French Impressionists, sneered at for imitating a foreign style, are in reality but practising their own, for the French artists simply developed a style which was British in its conception.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Wynford Dewhurst 1904, quoted in: Douglas Cooper (1954) The Courtauld Collection: A Catalogue and Introduction. p. 44.

Reality

“Here, in India, the problem is peculiar. Our trade tends steadily to expand and it is possible to demonstrate by means of statistics the increasing prosperity of the country generally. On the other hand, we in India know that the ancient handicrafts are decaying, that the fabrics for which India was renowned in the past are supplanted by the products of Western looms, and that our industries are not displaying that renewed vitality which will enable them to compete successfully in the home or the foreign market. The cutivator on the margin of subsistence remains a starveling cultivator, the educated man seeks Government employment or the readily available profession of a lawyer, while the belated artisan works on the lines marked out for him by his forefathers for a return that barely keeps body and soul together. It is said that India is dependent on agriculture and must always remain so. That may be so; but there can, I venture to think, be little doubt that the solution of the ever recurring famine problem is to be found not merely in the improvement of agriculture, the cheapening of loans, or the more equitable distribution of taxation, but still more in the removal from the land to industrial pursuits of a great portion of those, who, at the best, gain but a miserable subsistence, and on the slightest failure of the season are thrown on public charity. It is time for us in India to be up and doing; new markets must be found, new methods adopted and new handicrafts developed, whilst the educated unemployed, no less than the skilled and unskilled labourers, all those, in fact, whose precarious means of livelihood is a standing menace to the well-being of the State must find employment in reorganised and progressive industries It seems to me that what we want is more outside light and assistance from those interested in industries. Our schools should not be left entirely to officials who are either fully occupied with their other duties or whose ideas are prone, in the nature of things, to run in official grooves. I should like to see all those who "think" and “know" giving us their active assistance and not merely their criticism of our results. It is not Governments or forms of Government that have made the great industrial nations, but the spirit of the people and the energy of one and all working to a common end.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

On the occasion of the opening of Industrial and Arts Exhibition on 26 December 1903 in Madras (now known as Chennai) Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 203 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt, As ruler of the state

People, Education, School, Home

“I disagree with Les. We always found good cunt at the Lyceum. Friendly cunt, clean cunt, spare cunt, jeans and knicker stuffed full of nice juicy hairy cunt, handfuls of cunt, palmful grabbing the cunt by the stem, or the root – infantile memories of cunt – backrow slides – slithery oily cunt, the cunt that breathes – the cunt that’s neatly wrapped in cotton, in silk, in nylon, that announces, that speaks or thrusts, that winks that’s squeezed in a triangle of furtive cloth backed by an arse that’s creamy, springy billowy cushiony tight, knicker lined, knicker skinned, circumscribed by flowers and cotton, by views, clinging knicker, juice ridden knicker, hot knicker, wet knicker, swelling vulva knicker, witty cunt, teeth smiling the eyes biting cunt, cultured cunt, culture vulture cunt, finger biting cunt, cunt that pours, cunt that spreads itself over your soft lips, that attacks, cunt that imagines – cunt you dream about, cunt you create as a Melba, a meringue with smooth sides – remembered from school boys’ smelly first cunt, first foreign cunt, amazing cunt – cunt that’s cruel. Cunt that protects itself and makes you want it even more cunt – cunt that smells of the air, of the earth, of bakeries, of old apples, of figs, of sweat of hands of sour yeast of fresh fish cunt. So – are we going Les? We might pick up a bit of crumpet.”

Steven Berkoff East

East (1975), Scene 17

School, Smile, Dreams, Imagination

“To US Ambassador H. Monroe Browne, who owned a racehorse called Lacka Reason: "You are the only ambassador in the world to race a horse named after your country's foreign policy."”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Source: National Business Review, 17/2/86.

World, Horse, Country

“He was the rarest musician that his age did behold; having travelled beyond the seas, and compounded English with foreign skill in that faculty.”

John Dowland (1563–1626) English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer

Thomas Fuller The History of the Worthies of England ([1662] 1840), vol. 2, p. 426.
Criticism

Age, Travel, Sea

“Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Preface (p. 3)
Star Maker (1937)

Life, Fear, Country

“My first stop in Rome was a call on an old friend, Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli. Universally known as Sunni, she had been appointed to the post by the government of Lamberto Dini in part because of her personal stature. A former mayor and senator, the sister of Italy's most famous businessman, Gianni Agnelli, and the author of a best-selling memoir with the delightful title We always wore sailor suits, Sunni Agnelli combined aristocratic bearing with casual informality. Her giant white mane of hair and her imposing height added to her presence. She approached her job as she had probably approached everything else: with a relaxed confidence in her own intuition. She conveyed an impression of great amusement at the passing parade of overly intense men formulating policy. We had known each other for years, but only socially.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 136

Men, Confidence, Sister, Universe

“Your pa had seven years at sea, mostly in foreign parts.
You’ve heard him talk. He’s got a way about him, a way with words. He can make the temple bells tinkle for you, and you can just hear them big old elephants shuff-shuffling along, the priests callin’ folks to prayer and the like.
Your pa learned a sight of things most folks never even hear of. I’ve seen scholars back off an’ look at your pa, amazed.
You take these Injuns, now. You look at the way they live and you’ll say they don’t amount to much, but what are they thinkin’? What do they know? What memories do they have? They want different things, boy, and they consider different things important. Many a thing we’d give anything to know, they just take for granted.
Some of these Injuns, maybe all of them, they’re in tune with something. I don’t know what. But some of them have lost touch with it, and others are losin’ touch. Goin’ the white folks’ way might seem the likely thing to do, but maybe they lose as much as they gain.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Lonesome Gods (1983), Ch. 11

Way, Boy, Learning, Memory

“In the [past] one thousand years many parts of our country had been ruled by the Muslims and then by the British, but the nation had never compromised, in principle, its sovereignty over any part of the motherland. As a result, our nation had never ceased to strive for throwing out the aggressors and liberate those parts. And history tells us that ultimately it did succeed in freeing the entire land from the clutches of foreign invaders. However, for the first time, Partition conceded the moral and legal right to them over certain parts of the country and declared an ignominious finale to the one thousand years old heroic struggle for freedom. Thus it was an act of humiliating surrender on the point of principle. The usual interpretation of Partition, however, does not utter a word about this aspect. Even while conceding Partition to be a tragedy, it is sought to be made out as the only practical way out then available - as the inevitable price for achieving freedom.”

H.V. Sheshadri (1926–2005) Indian writer

Source: The Tragic Story of Partition (1982), p.12.

Way, History, Freedom, Time

“The British…used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language…was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girls’-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate feebly to the enemy.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

School, Girl, Learning

“Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 41.
Collected Works

“The people are the masters of the revolution in each country. It is like putting a cart before the horse that foreigners carry out the revolution for them. The revolution can neither be exported nor imported.”

Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Quoted in Kim Il Sung, Master of Leadership (1976) by Takagi Takeo

People, Horse, Country

“If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And then give the new world
To our daughters and sons. If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Translations and adaptations, If We Only Have Love (1968)

Love, Death, World, Daughters

“You have no right whatever to speak on behalf of the Government. Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin. His task is quite sufficiently difficult without the irresponsible statements of the kind you are making... I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Harold Laski, Chairman of the Labour Party (1946), quoted in David Butler and Gareth Butler, Twentieth Century British Political Facts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 289.
Prime Minister

Silence, Parting

“Positive non-alignment, or indiscriminate openmindedness to the world, is a fundamental feature of Zaire's foreign policy. To this end, we are exerting ourselves in a bid to promote genuine cooperation among all countries that are willing to accept Zaire for what it is…The debacles that Zaire has faced and continues to face in various areas - colonization, alienation, exploitation, secession, rebellion - are due to the imperialist policies of the superpowers who have assumed the right to govern the world. Thus, we do not want to be involved directly or indirectly in any attempt to subjugate a state or group of states.”

Mobutu Sésé Seko (1930–1997) President of Zaïre

Mobutu explaining his foreign policy. Elliot and Dymally, p. 51

World, Country

“For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

Life, Women, Children, World

“Baladitya understands that in addition to being foreign territory the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected people. Symbol and faith serve the rest.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 12, “Glittering Stone: Steadfast Guardian” (p. 401)

Hunger, People, Faith, Soul

“There is perhaps nothing more important in the world today than the steadiness and consistency of the foreign policy of this Republic. Too much depends on the United States for us to indulge in the luxury of either undue pessimism or premature optimism.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

World, Optimism, Dependency

“Both Herodotus and Thycidides describe the Macedonians as foreigners, a distinct people lying outside the frontiers of the Greek-city states.”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

Source: In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon (1990), p. 92

People, Lying

“I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Country

“We are deeply unified in our support of basic principles: our belief in stability in our financial structure, in our determination we must have fiscal responsibility, in our determination not to establish and operate a paternalistic sort of government where a man's initiative is almost taken away from him by force. Only in the last few weeks, I have been reading quite an article on the experiment of almost complete paternalism in a friendly European country. This country has a tremendous record for socialistic operation, following a socialistic philosophy, and the record shows that their rate of suicide has gone up almost unbelievably and I think they were almost the lowest nation in the world for that. Now, they have more than twice our rate. Drunkenness has gone up. Lack of ambition is discernible on all sides.. Therefore, with that kind of example, let's always remember Lincoln's admonition. Let's do in the federal Government only those things that people themselves cannot do at all, or cannot so well do in their individual capacities. Now, my friends, I know that these words have been repeated to you time and time again until you're tired of them. But I ask you only this, to contemplate them and remember this--Lincoln added another sentence to that statement. He said that in all those things where the individual can solve his own problems the Government ought not to interfere, for all are domestic affairs and this comprehends the things that the individual is normally concerned with, because foreign affairs does belong to the President by the Constitution--and they are things that really require constant governmental action.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

July 27, 1960 Remarks at the Republican National Committee Breakfast, Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Illinois http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11891#ixzz1fU73Watz 1960s

People, World, Support, Problem

“The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book II, Chapter V, p. 402.

Sea

“The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live… In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threathen China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Munk debates – “21st Century will belong to China” – Kissinger, Zakaria, Ferguson, Li http://www.livestream.com/munkdebates/video?clipId=pla_937b4cf4-e0ea-4ed5-a458-6a3ba43769b8 2000s

World, Peace, Imagination, Problem

“Patel's presidential address to the Congress, 1931: No one would die of starvation in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place 7,000 feet above sea level. Its military expenditure would not be heavy. Its army would not subjugate its own people or other lands. Its best-paid officials would not earn a great deal more than its lowest-paid servants. And finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.”

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950) Indian freedom fighter who forged united India

Gandhi, Rajmohan. Patel: A Life, p. 92

People, Justice, Sea, Clothes

“The overall agenda here is quite simply the ruling classes, or the classes of Europe intend to stride on to the world stage as a powerful economic entity. And they want to be as powerful as the US, meaning they want a stronger foreign policy and a military wing to back them up. But I can assure the Government that the debate will be a very intensive debate, a very vigorous debate and I think the benefit perhaps this time is that certain distractions that were raised the last time would be set aside, and therefore we can concentrate on the more fundamental issues. […] Take for example this notion that Irish youth would be conscripted into an army. The only people I heard that from was Government ministers in the course of the campaign who said this is being said. Nobody here raised any such red herring. These were the so-called concerns that were being addressed. But the major concerns as to what the Treaty was really about has not been changed one iota.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

breakingnews.ie http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/eykfojojqlkf/

People, Youth, World, Thinking

“The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires.

God

“The seething racial resentment in the Third World against the West — decades after independence and trillions in foreign aid — should cause second thoughts about opening our borders to mass immigration from that world. Not everyone coming here brings in his heart the passionate attachment to America we attribute to the peoples of Ellis Island.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, State of Emergency (2006)

People, World, Passion, Heart

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Art, Freedom

“During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser's Liberty ships to Francis Chichester's Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy's last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

Alistair Cooke's America (1973)

Life

“You said in our old ash-tree a bird had built its nest;
Perhaps this very linnet has there its place of rest.
Now who will keep his little ones when night begins to fall?
They have no other shelter, and they will perish all.
There'll be no more sweet singing within that lonely grove;
Now, Henry, free your prisoner, I pray you, for my love.
Our father is a soldier, and in some distant war
He too might be a prisoner in foreign lands afar.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Prisoner
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Love, War, Bird, Tree

“The more books and articles on Ayodhya and on "communalism" I look into, the more I feel confirmed in my assessment that the Hindu presentation of their own case regarding Ayodhya is the single worst public relations job in world history. (…) Future books on the affair will certainly include a chapter on "the Ayodhya scandal": the unscrupled use of academic and media power positions by the secularists to suppress relevant evidence, and the gullibility of foreign scholars relying on hearsay from Indian colleagues whose bona fides is open to question. (…) Future scholars of political and communications science will study the reporting on the Ayodhya affair as an absolute classic of brilliantly successful disinformation. … The buffoon of the affair is the Western class of India-watchers …. they have swallowed the anti-Hindu propaganda hook, line and sinker.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

K. Elst : The Ayodhya Demolition: an Evaluation, in India., & Dasgupta, S. (1995). The Ayodhya reference: The Supreme Court judgement and commentaries.
1990s

Books, World, Feeling, History

“Very much! China presents Vietnam with a very big problem. China is taking over Vietnam, from Cholon, where there are rich Chinese, to Haiphong. They are everywhere now with their product. My wife is from the North, people there resent China more than the South feared the Viet Cong. The Chinese are invaders — like any other foreigners — to fight. We must stop the Chinese. You know the dikes built on the Red River? If they break, what happens? A flood!”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

2000s, A Bag of Earth, A Promise To Keep (2005)

People, Fear, Problem, Fight

“Although each of our armed services is unique and different, the U. S. Army holds a special position of significance and trust. Its ranks come from the people, the country's roots, and it is closest to the people. In foreign confrontations the United States is not committed until its land forces- its Army- is committed. And in the event of hostilities, the Army historically has borne the brunt of war, the human cost, taking the great bulk of the casualties. The Army as an institution knows this and has been traditionally reluctant to go to war, its leaders seeking to insure that war is truly necessary and that our civilian leaders exploit all other avenues before taking that final step.”

Bruce Palmer Jr. (1913–2000) United States Army Chief of Staff

Source: The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 209

Hostility, War, People, Country

“Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
Nusquam est qui ubique est. Vitam in peregrinatione exigentibus hoc evenit, ut multa hospitia habeant, nullas amicitias.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter II: On discursiveness in reading, Line 2.

Travel, Time, Personality

“Deprived of the protection of the Union, of the aegis of the Constitution, they would soon dwindle into petty States, to be again rent in twain by dissensions or through the ambition of selfish chieftains, and would become a prey to foreign powers. They gravely talk of holding treaties with Great Britain and other foreign powers, and the great advantages which would arise to the South from separation are discussed. Treaties with Great Britain! Alliance with foreign powers! Have these men forgotten history? Look at Spanish America! Look at the condition of every petty State, which by alliance with Great Britain is subject to continual aggression!”

Sam Houston (1793–1863) nineteenth-century American statesman, politician, and soldier, namesake of Houston, Texas

1860s, Speech in Austin (1860)

Men, History, Selfishness

“Six officers, belonging to privateers that were taken by the enemy, made their escape last night. They inform me they were taken by the last fleet that came in. They had about six thousand foreign troops on board, one quarter of which had the black scurvy, and died very fast.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (31 October 1776)

Night

“The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.”

Frantz Fanon book The Wretched of the Earth

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 42.

God, People, Way

“Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans.”

James Bovard (1956) American journalist

From Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave, 2003) http://www.jimbovard.com/Epigrams%20page%20Terrorism%20&%20Tyranny.htm

“All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Quotes, Home, Soul, Reality

“There is no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions. The failure of these institutions to function and the instability of these regimes in Muslim countries, manifest in frequent changes and coups d'état, is most often the consequence of their a priori opposition to Islam, as the fundamental and foremost feeling of the people in those countries. Claiming its right to order its own world alone, Islam clearly rules out the right and the possibility of the application of any foreign ideology in its own region. there is, therefore, no lay principle, and the state ought to be a reflection of and to support the moral concepts of the religion.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 30, as quoted in The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans, Aleksandar Pavković, Springer Science+Business Media https://books.google.com/books?id=u3paCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUhfPIl43WAhVHro8KHReTDhEQ6AEINzAD#v=onepage&q&f=false,

People, World, Peace, Faith

“Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and this book on genocide and government mass murder—what I call democide—in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), pp. 1-2

War, Books

“In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

God

“It is obvious that, with the best intentions in the world, Americanization cannot be established by propaganda. It is evident that, valuable as are the campaigns and parades and crusades of one kind or another, so long as they are without coherent form and interrelation they reach only the mass and may often add to rather than decrease the confusion. To reach the thousand subtle strains running through these old races, so highly organized and yet so intensely personal, Americanization must be simplified. It must find a way of reaching and holding the individual. We face the indisputable fact that almost without exception every foreign-born male adult is a member of some racial organization which takes precedence in his mind over every other form of association, of which he is a significant part, and in which he is recognized as an individual of worth and standing.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

World, Way, Parting, Personality

“American foreign policy must be more than the management of crisis. It must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

1990s, A Distinctly American Internationalism (November 1999)

Peace, Time

“But what must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benifet of the national privation and self denial?”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book II, On Distribution, Chapter VII, Section IV, p. 340

Home

“The fifth and most important principle of our foreign policy is support of national independence—the right of each people to govern themselves—and to shape their own institutions. For a peaceful world order will be possible only when each country walks the way that it has chosen to walk for itself. We follow this principle by encouraging the end of colonial rule. We follow this principle, abroad as well as at home, by continued hostility to the rule of the many by the few—or the oppression of one race by another. We follow this principle by building bridges to Eastern Europe. And I will ask the Congress for authority to remove the special tariff restrictions which are a barrier to increasing trade between the East and the West. The insistent urge toward national independence is the strongest force of today's world in which we live. In Africa and Asia and Latin America it is shattering the designs of those who would subdue others to their ideas or their will. It is eroding the unity of what was once a Stalinist empire. In recent months a number of nations have east out those who would subject them to the ambitions of mainland China. History is on the side of freedom and is on the side of societies shaped from the genius of each people. History does not favor a single system or belief—unless force is used to make it so. That is why it has been necessary for us to defend this basic principle of our policy, to defend it in Berlin, in Korea, in Cuba—and tonight in Vietnam.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Hostility, People, World, Peace

“The tired assertion that America "supports democracy" in the Middle East is increasingly transparent. It was false 50 years ago, when we supported and funded the hated Shah of Iran to prevent nationalization of Iranian oil, and it’s false today when we back an unelected military dictator in Pakistan - just to name two examples. If honest democratic elections were held throughout the Middle East tomorrow, many countries would elect religious fundamentalist leaders hostile to the United States. Cliché or not, the Arab Street really doesn’t like America, so we should stop the charade about democracy and start pursuing a coherent foreign policy that serves America’s long-term interests.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Hypocrisy in the Middle East http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst022607.htm (February 26, 2007). 2000s, 2006-2009

Hate, Hostility, Democracy, Support

“You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a women's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.”

O. Henry book Roads of Destiny

"The Fourth in Salvador"
Roads of Destiny (1909)

Women, Money, Home

“The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Communication, Understanding

“Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (…) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(…) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts.””

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.
K. Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, in The Problem with Secularism (2007)
2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Truth, Lie, Way, Feeling

“We have experienced the truth of this prophecy, for England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbott, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery.”

William of Malmesbury English historian

Gesta Regum Anglorum of 1125. (Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066-c.1220 (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 56.)

Truth, Hope

“There are many imperfections in the workings of the British constitution: we do not live in a democracy, we do not have an elected head of state or an elected upper Chamber, and we do not have an accountable judiciary. We have only an elected House of Commons, in which the Prime Minister can use the royal prerogative virtually to pass legislation. Indeed, the Government were legally advised that the Maastricht treaty could be passed in that way. However, there is some accountability for what the Executive are doing in terms of foreign and defence policy. Under the Maastricht treaty, with a common foreign and defence policy, that accountability will not exist. It will not exist in the European Parliament, which can question but not call to account. It will not exist here, because we shall always be told that policy is being made somewhere else.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/mar/30/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (30 March 1993). 1990s

Way, Democracy, Question, Housing

“Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening convey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 4
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Sense

“In spite of the fact that we have no such fleet as we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun. It will now be my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession, in order that the sun's rays may fall fruitfully upon our activity and trade in foreign parts, that our industry and agriculture may develop within the state and our sailing sports upon the water, for our future lies upon the water.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech in Hamburg (18 June 1901)
As quoted in Germanism from Within (1916) by Alexander Duncan Mclaren
1900s
Variant: Germany must have her place in the sun. (is not of Wilhelm himself but of Bernhard von Bülow

Sport, Water, Sun, Future

“To prevent his inventions getting abroad to foreigners, Mr. Arkwright purposely omitted to give so full and particular a description of his inventions, in the specification of his last patent, as he would otherwise have done, believing, from the concluding clause in the patent, that he need not so fully describe. His patent right being largely infringed, he was obliged to prosecute some infringers, although an association was formed to resist him; but on a trial in the King's Bench in July 1781 a verdict was given against him, on the ground that his specification was not as full and accurate as the law requires. Having established a business that already employs above 5,000 persons, and a capital of not less than 200,000 l.”

Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) textile entrepreneur; developer of the cotton mill

he hopes to be relieved by Parliament, from the consequences of an unintentional error.
The case, 1782

Law, Hope, Error, Business

“Frivolous thinking is due to foreign thought. Japan must no longer let the impudence of the white peoples go unpunished. It is the duty of Japan to fulfill her natural destiny, to cause China to respect the Japanese, to expel Chinese influence from Manchuria, and to follow the way of imperial destiny.”

Sadao Araki (1877–1966) Japanese general

Quoted in "World War II almanac" - Page 9 - by Robert Goralski - History - 1981

People, Way, Nature, Thinking

Quotes about foreigner page 11

Quotes about foreigner
page 11