The interaction of disparate cultures, the vehemence of the ideals that led the immigrants here, the opportunity offered by a new life, all gave America a flavor and a character that make it as unmistakable and as remarkable to people today as it was to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early part of the nineteenth century.

— John F. Kennedy

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

— Zadie Smith

They shouldn't teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it on makes for trouble. I and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.

— James Jones

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Lung by the fishpond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Huang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Erie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willed, that you can find best friends Site and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Site is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it's best — less trouble).

— Zadie Smith

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.

— Salman Rushdie

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

— Maxine Hong Kingston

Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.

— Theodore J. Kaczynski

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

— DaShanne Stokes

We of alien looks or words must stick together.

— C.J. Sansom

We wanted a labor force, but human beings came.

— Terry Hayes