Fred Korematsu Quotes

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

One man’s exile is but a drop in the sea of human misery

Oppressed strangers in our land…

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

In the internment camp, there was nothing to do.

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

It's quite difficult for me not to be able to return to my country, but in my country justice has been murdered.

Sari Nusseibeh is a man without a country.

I was unwelcome in the U.S. for four years.

There is no hope for my life if I am ever returned to Belize.

The Master will allow him no home, that he may become a vagrant. Becoming a vagrant, he will arrest him as a vagabond, and visit him with imprisonment and stripes ... He will shut him off from the courts, seal his mouth as a witness.

We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and not being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognize us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff.

When the Emergency was proclaimed at midnight on 25 June 1975, they came to arrest me. I managed to escape by going to a friend's house nearby.

Granddad was deported to a Siberian prison camp at the age of 15.

To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.

I was really upset because I was branded as an enemy alien when I'm an American.

I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong.

I still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don't think I could get out again.

North Korea is still my homeland, my country. I suffered on the outside because I was alien, without identity. I was nobody. I was in the worst situation, fighting for everything, to survive.

I've said many of my friends are in jail; some already died.