Emma Goldman Quotes

I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.

You can know the whole world and still feel lost in it.

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.

New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.

Traveling in Europe made me understand that America has an island mentality: No one exists except us. There's a whole other world out there, but most Americans - all they know is America, the marketing plan.

I'm not disinterested in the rest of the world, but studies show the rest of the world is really freaking far away.

A lot of Americans don't really leave the country.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

'Chinese Democracy' wasn't trying to tell China to have a democracy or anything like that. I don't have an opinion on what kind of government they should have. My thing is, I went to stay there for about three months, and everywhere I went, the people are so shielded from what's going on in the world.

In 19 years growing up in Israel I had no Jewish friends. Zero.

But I can definitely say that when I go back to China, I feel very foreign there.

I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.

When we belong to a community and learn things that are no way related to our society, we live as unwanted entities in that society.

I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.

I miss quite major cultural signposts quite often.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

I like living in Berkeley, but I know Berkeley's not the world.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

there were times when I was more at home in front of millions of people than I was at home.

I cannot speak your england.