Emir Kusturica Quotes

When people ask me where I am from I never say, 'Serbia.' I always say, 'I come from a country that no longer exists.'

Nobody can send me to Pakistan. India is my country, and I love my country. Five generations of my family have lived and died on this land, and even my children will live in this country because this is my homeland.

I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

Bosnia is a complicated country: three religions, three nations and those 'others'. Nationalism is strong in all three nations; in two of them there are a lot of racism, chauvinism, separatism; and now we are supposed to make a state out of that.

Italy, which is inhabited only by a single race speaking the same language and professing the same religion, experiences so many difficulties in its unification. For the moment all it has achieved is anarchy and disorder. Judge what would happen in Turkey if free scope were given to all the different national aspirations …. It would need a century and torrents of blood to establish even a fairly stable state of affairs.

These are not concentration camps, but transient centers …. You are witnessing a great moment in the history of the Serbian nation.

I am neither a Serb nor a Bulgarian, I am a South Slav.

Milosevic was an outstanding politician who gave his all to serving his fatherland.

That was the fear that there would be no identity anymore, for Canada. It was foolish, because there are so many examples of separatism, and nothing has disintegrated, unless they went to war.

We should recognize that nationalism does not mean discriminating against people of a different nationality. It simply means not allowing such people to seize our political power, for only when we Han are in control politically do we have a nation.

For the nation to live, the tribe must die.

That is when the Left is going to love America - when it is not America anymore.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

I'd rather be Welsh than English, that's for sure.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

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

It's not always clear where a healthy patriotism shades into a dangerous nationalism.

Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

I mean, Turkey is my country. You know, it's my flag. That is where we're raised... My family is born there. So that's why, like, it's tough to see that... your country don't want you.

I don't describe myself as a nationalist, but I do love my country.

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.

If you play in this country, live in this country, and you grow up in the heartland - and you put on a Russian uniform - you are not a patriotic person.