Ethnic Tensions Quotes

Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements … Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us.

In times of economic distress, it's only natural for people - and Americans have done this for many years - to look for a scapegoat. Depending on where you live in this country, the scapegoats are either, frankly, Mexicans or Muslims. So, you know, God save you if you happened to be a Mexican Muslim in America right now.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

The most damaging forms of intolerance are connected with religious, racial and political differences of opinion.

The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

It is quite clear, however, that there won't be any real changes with the current clan structure having seized power in the course of the Karabakh conflict.

Pakistan is not a unified country. In large parts of the country, the state is regarded as a Punjabi state, not their (the people's) state.

Democracies are often run by ethnically based groups prepared to do terrible things to other ethnic groups... or they can be very corrupt, dominated by elites...

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

Ireland was almost constantly agitated by rebellions and insurrections, which, although not always taking their rise from the difference of religious opinions, between the English and Irish, were aggravated and rendered more bitter and irreconcilable from that cause.

The situation in Iraq is dangerous but the regional situation is also very complicated and precarious.

If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia - two communities bleeding each other to death for generations.

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way.

Arabs don't have to be the victims of the Jewish war between Lieberman and Netanyahu.

Although we live in a safe and stable country, Central Africa as a region has been held back by seemingly perpetual conflict - over power, resources, and who controls them.

Kashmir is the real test of secularism in India.

The illiteracy test will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking emigrants and Germans, Scandinavians, and French. In other words, the races most affected by the illiteracy test are those…with which the English-speaking people have never hitherto assimilated, and who are the most alien to the great body of the people of the United States.

Most of the Palestinians don't understand what they're doing... Politically, people can say what they want. The problem is not political, but religious.

A European war is bound to come sooner or later in which the issue will be one of a struggle between Germandom and Slavdom.

I've never been to Ukraine, but I have heard it's very dangerous for a black man. There are crazy racists who have already sent me death threats.

The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.

Terrorists hate Americans. Indians hate each other. A terrorist will blow up an airport. Indians like to work at the airport. That would be counter-productive.

I wrote about the Serbs, because no one was writing about them, even if I also think about the Croat and Muslim victims.