Top 100 Ethnic Quotes
#1. And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.
James Earl Jones
#2. Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
Michael Ignatieff
#3. But we acted pre-emptively in Kosovo in 1999 to stop Milosevic from doing what he was doing and increasingly doing the ethnic cleansing in a systematic way.
Lord Robertson
#4. The Republic of Macedonia is being built on democratic ideals and values, not on ethnic groups. Those ideals and values include economic opportunities, language and educational opportunities, religious rights, and political processes.
Boris Trajkovski
#5. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid
Michelle Alexander
#6. While we appreciate our ancestry as Americans or even our ethnic ancestry and our color of skin, we believe that our real citizenship is in Heaven.
Max Lucado
#7. I just didn't want to be pigeonholed as an 'ethnic comic' or an 'Asian comic.' I just wanted to be on the same playing field as everyone else.
Aziz Ansari
#8. Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world?
Martin Jacques
#9. Low-income people, racial or ethnic minorities, pregnant women, seniors, people with special needs, people in rural areas - they all have a much harder time accessing a dentist than other groups of Americans.
Bernie Sanders
#10. Afghanistan's borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.
Stephen Kinzer
#11. He [Reagan] likes to tell jokes and that's why he told the ethnic joke that got him into some trouble. Perhaps if reporters didn't overreact to a politician's telling the very same joke they routinely hear and tell in the city room, we'd get more humor.
Robert Scheer
#12. Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they are different, and it's not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter
Ronald H. Balson
#13. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
Dave Barry
#14. If a harmonious relationship is established amongst societies and religious beliefs in today's multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural world, then it will surely set a very good example for others.
Dalai Lama
#15. Latinos are disproportionately more likely to be injured on the job than other ethnic groups.
Grace Napolitano
#16. The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
Thomas Sowell
#17. Lebanon, of course, is a country with great problems. Traditionally, they have religious-national groups or ethnic-national groups. They have the Druses. Even the two Moslem sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are apart. Then they have the armed groups. Everybody's got a private army.
Menachem Begin
#18. For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death.
John Leonard
#19. The civil war in Rwanda and other ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.
Michel Chossudovsky
#20. As someone who is both an ethnic minority and openly gay, I often talk about how simply being who I am has given me a double awareness of the vulnerability that some Americans may be facing.
Mark Takano
#21. I don't think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
John Major
#22. People from all over the world were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. They came from many different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu believers were killed together as they worked in the towers.
David Blunkett
#23. Ethnic and religious conflict remain the most intractable and dangerous problems in the world today.
John Shattuck
#24. I am the leader of one country which has two alphabets, three languages, four religions, five nationalities, six republics, surrounded by seven neighbours, a country in which live eight ethnic minorities.
Josip Broz Tito
#25. We are being colonised without New Zealanders having some say in the numbers of people coming in and where they are coming from. This is a deliberate policy of ethnic engineering and re-population.
Winston Peters
#26. Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, "Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#27. Long before gun control was touted as 'common sense' measures, the concept was promoted as a means to keep ethnic populations in an unequal position while assuaging the fears of whites.
Niger Innis
#28. When you grow up in that (multi-ethnic) environment, you see the world differently. Being a mixed-race child, I didn't always see colour in people, I really didn't. It was other people that made me see the colour all the time.
Halle Berry
#29. In the same way that ethnic Israel was the first fruits of humankind due to the achievements of their patriarchs, Christendom includes the great harvest of the faithful because of Jesus's merits.
James Mikolajczyk
#30. Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.
Jean Dubuffet
#31. My mullet was an insecurity shield. My mullet was an ethnic hatchet. My mullet was an arrow on fire.
My mullet said to the literary world, Hello, you privileged prep-school assholes, I'm here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.
Sherman Alexie
#32. The island is in Kenya, the water is in Uganda ... But the [Luos, a Kenyan ethnic group] are mad, they want to fish here but this is Uganda.
Yoweri Museveni
#33. The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen.
David L. Sills
#34. When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled.
Simon Schama
#35. It's not unusual for socio-economic, even racial or ethnic, groups to cluster.
Jay Parini
#36. The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that.
Milton Friedman
#37. There is no ethnic cleansing in Bahrain, no mass genocide, no policy of killing innocent people.
Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa
#38. How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?
Adam Mansbach
#39. I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
Jonathan Sacks
#40. What liberals mean by 'goose-stepping' or 'ethnic cleansing' is generally something along the lines of 'eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.' But they can't say that, or people would realize they're crazy.
Ann Coulter
#41. The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Christopher Hitchens
#42. In a lot of films, they're showing more complete, developed characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The larger concern is to be able to tastefully explore the stereotypes, and still move past them to see the core of people.
Forest Whitaker
#43. A lot of the interesting issues and dynamics within a city occur over things such as socio-economic issues or ethnic issues. But they require a much more elaborate model of human behavior.
Will Wright
#44. With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion. With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.
Edward Kennedy
#45. We must pardon everyone because if not, it will be like we will have to punish all the population. We must pardon everyone because all ethnic groups did bad acts. (Thirty-eight-year-old female, Nyanza-Lac)
Peter Uvin
#46. Decided to put aside ethnic differences in the cause of making more money.
Terry Pratchett
#47. They wanted to audition people for the Middle East correspondent on 'The Daily Show.' They wanted to hire somebody ethnic for that slot. Helms had left, Cordry had left, and they felt that they needed an ethnic face. So, I went in and auditioned, and I got the job.
Aasif Mandvi
#48. It's no stretch to picture me standing next to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro. Those are ethnic New York men. I'm an ethnic New York girl. Everybody has their limitations. I mean, I should never be cast as Queen Elizabeth.
Ellen Barkin
#49. As a child in the rural district of Penal I remember sharing meals from the same pot with neighbours of different racial, ethnic, social and economic backgrounds.
Kamla Persad-Bissessar
#50. I think it's important to be extremely proud of one's origins, especially when you are a foreign actress with ethnic features.
Freida Pinto
#51. The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better.
Billy Taylor
#52. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.
Wynton Marsalis
#53. Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.
Colin Powell
#54. Women's rights are more important than their ethnic rights.
Ruth Rendell
#55. When I was a young student, I only listened to foreign music, mainly rock music and hard rock. Then I surprised myself by discovering ethnic music. Now I like to listen to music from different places, and in many situations. Even when you work, some ethnic music calms the nerves.
Dmitry Medvedev
#56. Terrorists from the Islamic State (formerly ISIS) have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority during their offensive in the north, Iraq's human rights minister told Reuters on Sunday.
Anonymous
#57. where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom*
*Made it up
and extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
Terry Pratchett
#58. Ballet Hispanico is a mixture of ethnic, ballet, social, jazz - you name it, it's doing it. The company has been going strong for more than 20 years, and you can see why: It may not be refined, but it's full of beans.
Robert Gottlieb
#59. What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire - the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.
Ellen Ochoa
#60. The report defines acts of ethnic cleansing as including the separation of men from women, the detention of men, and the destruction of houses and their repopulation by another ethnic group later on. This was precisely the repertoire of the Jewish soldiers in the 1948 war.
Noam Chomsky
#61. While the Bible has nothing to say about how ethnic distinctions came to be, it does have definitive statements about how we are to regard them: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).
John H. Walton
#62. Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports, and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.
Branch Rickey
#63. Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages.
Pankaj Mishra
#64. Racial and ethnic segragtion is a gospel issue! Cephas' fear and wihdrawal from fellowship across ethnic lines was "not in step with the truth of the gospel." Christ had died to tear down this wall.
John Piper
#65. In some cases, the casting directors have casted blindly and have not looked into my ethnic background.
Mario Lopez
#66. The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as "minorities." There is no "majority." The
Thomas Sowell
#67. Put differently, we've made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything. No one else feels welcome. What Jesus and the apostles taught was that you were welcomed because the church welcomed all to the table.
Scot McKnight
#68. The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.
Audre Lorde
#69. Cooking with your kids is a remarkable exercise to let them in on the purchasing part of the process - kids love to shop, and its great to take them to these ethnic places where people don't always speak the language.
Tom Douglas
#70. I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.
Norman Finkelstein
#71. Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.
Neale Donald Walsch
#72. I'd been collecting different ethnic instruments here and there, and then I started making little bell type stuff, looking for weird little sound toys.
Z'EV
#73. Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.
Ruth Benedict
#74. It's funny - when I started acting, I didn't know I was going to be talking about Asian-American issues so much. You know what, though? It just comes with the territory, being ethnic.
Justin Chon
#76. I don't think President Obama has been that revolutionary in reaching out to ethnic communities. President Reagan did a lot for the black community that people don't realize.
Terrence Howard
#77. I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.
Anton Yelchin
#78. Los Angeles is a very special city. It's a great ethnic mix, a great cultural mix.
Gustavo Dudamel
#79. People identify with me - everyone does - African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.
Janice Dickinson
#80. We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.
Jonathan Sacks
#81. Nationalism and ethnic pride, in the long run, delay human development, and the misery they cause must be recognized. If enough people saw that , maybe we wouldn't have so many wars.
Harvey Pekar
#82. Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.
Dinaw Mengestu
#83. I don't do politics, I don't do religion, I don't do ethnic jokes.
Bill Engvall
#84. I intend to be the president of all citizens of Macedonia, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, regardless of their political standing. I shall not allow ethnic hatred and intolerance to undermine Macedonia's stability.
Boris Trajkovski
#85. SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.
William H. McRaven
#86. The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.
Niall Ferguson
#87. I own a shameless number of ethnic necklaces acquired at local markets in developing countries or inherited from my grandmother. These have seen me through meetings in Davos and visits to refugee camps.
Leila Janah
#88. As an Italian-American, I have a special responsibility to be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes.
Al D'Amato
#89. When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.
Walter Kaufmann
#90. Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.
Fred Pearce
#91. The initial wealth of a group and its time of arrival are obviously important, as many wealthy "old families " show, but the Jews arrived late and penniless in the nineteenth century and are now more affluent than any other ethnic group.
Thomas Sowell
#92. In America, we're trying to find a peaceful solution in the Middle East and we're not going to be divided along any lines, including religious lines, including ethnic backgrounds.
Darrell Issa
#93. Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.
Samuel P. Huntington
#94. There was violence because first of all, there were ethnic differences and names. If you were small, they called you a runt, and you had to do something about that even if there were five other guys.
Jack Kirby
#95. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
Arundhati Roy
#96. I am interested in recent scholarly work examining the emergence of women's studies and ethnic studies departments and the development of the neoliberal university.
Dean Spade
#97. All this happiness on display is suspect ... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
Ian McEwan
#98. We are not wedded to anyone in Syria. We are not concerned with any personality. We are concerned with keeping Syria in one piece, territorially integral, sovereign, independent and secular, where the rights of all groups, ethnic and others, are fully respected.
Sergei Lavrov
#99. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein
Michael Pollan
#100. Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities.
Michael Ignatieff
