Jonathan Franzen Quotes

I think for the most part people are proud of the bicultural foundation New Zealand is built on and the fact that we are a multicultural society.

As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict.

We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language, it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.

We are becoming a society where multiculture means no public culture.

Among immigrants today, it is increasingly fashionable to reject American exceptionalism in favor of multiculturalism. To pretend that this isn't happening isn't optimism; it's sheer fantasy.

If you try to discuss multiculturalism in the U.K., you're labeled a racist.

Multiculturalism, if its logic is fully played out, is the ideology of national suicide.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization.

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies.

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal.

I'm not against other cultures, but I believe what the Germans call a "leitkultur", a dominant culture that we should have, even in our constitution state, what our dominant culture is and that our laws should apply to that culture and to no other one.

There is a simple maxim that I use to express this situation, 'when tolerance becomes a one way street, it leads to cultural suicide.'

I never would like to be a country that is that multicultural that, for instance, the Islamic values become more dominant. We should not do that. We should stop that.

But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, "I have the right to hold onto my culture," and that's what makes it difficult.

Multiculturalism may well be our saviour, wresting us out from the straitjacket of our history, thrusting the old continent into an environment where other ethnicities, less cynical and more positive, will play a big role in its future.

I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it - at least culturally.

When you're the single French person in the middle of 10 Tunisians, the majority will impose their way of life on the minority.

The mixture of the Trinidadian people and the Indian people has caused a new culture to emerge.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

I've benefited from the best of both societies and both cultures, East and West.

I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.

I don't think you lose culture because you act different cultures.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

When I see the cultural diversity that exists today, I feel that we must defend it, and we need Europe, because otherwise we are going to live in a society with a single model, the Anglo-American model.