Quotes & Sayings About Emigration

How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival. — Daniel Alarcon

Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening. — M T Anderson

And that was exactly her gamble: that they'd accept her as the person she is now, coming back. She left here as a a naive young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she's proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it'll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won't stay. — Milan Kundera

Through the magical power of a dress she could see herself imprisoned in a life she did not want and would never again be able to leave. As if long ago, at the start of her adult life, she had had a choice among several possible lives and had ended up choosing the one that took her to France. And as if those other lives, rejected and abandoned, were still lying in wait for her and were jealously watching for her from their lairs. — Milan Kundera

I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city. — Ken Bruen

History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner. — Claudio Magris

When she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague. — Milan Kundera

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration. — Edith Hahn Beer

During intervals of humanity, some disposition has been manifested to permit the return of those who have never offended, who have been banished by a terror which the government itself has reprobated, & to permit in case of arrestation, an investigation of the fact of emigration as well as of the identity of the person accus'd. — John Marshall

I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. So I feel deeply connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah. — Terry Tempest Williams

I am for reformation by emigration. The emigration of the mind before the revolution of the state. The soul and mind must be free before one has a right to be a member of a free government. — Ameen Rihani

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? — Doris Lessing

Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide. — Howard Zinn

The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it
while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation
takes cover under dubious and sinister masks. — Norman Manea

The constitution ought to specifically state that every nation is left entirely independent and supreme in its internal affairs, such as regulating emigration and all other similar matters. — George William Norris

Aunt Fostalina says when she first came to America she went to school during the day and worked nights at Eliot's hotels, cleaning hotel rooms together with people from countries like Senegal, Cameroon, Tibet, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and so on. It was like the damn United Nations there, she likes to say. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race. — Alfred Russel Wallace

Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever ... It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along ... the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there ... It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet ... Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings ... — Edward O. Wilson

It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but of one thing I am certain; he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way. — Edward Taylor

The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No' ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people ... The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive ... They have to accept it. — Chaim Weizmann

As a general rule. it's a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And intimacy issue. It's a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration. — Lee Child

The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? — Milan Kundera

What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. — James Madison

The perpetual struggle for room and food. — Thomas Malthus

Takes a special kind to go
another kind to stay here

........

Nowhere do such patriots so embrace
the leaving of the place — Kate Tough

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France. — Milan Kundera

The proximity of these two cultures over the course of many generations presented both sides with a stark choice about how to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, factories were being built in Chicago and slums were taking root in New York while Indians fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away. It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans - mostly men - wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society. Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, and it left Western thinkers flummoxed about how to explain such an apparent rejection of their society. When — Sebastian Junger

I managed to convince myself that I'd left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from? they ask. Does it matter? I answer.
But it does. — Kapka Kassabova

Normally leaving one's country is a grave step: it involves leaving the society and culture in which we have been raised,, the society and culture whose language we use in speech and thought to express and understand ourselves, our aims, goals and values; the society and culture, customs, and conventions we depend on to find our place in the social world. In large part, we affirm our society and culture, and have an intimate and inexpressible knowledge of it, even though much of it we may question, if not reject. The government's authority cannot, then be freely accepted in the sense that the bonds of society and culture, of history and social place of origin, begin so early to shape our life and are normally so strong that the right of emigration does not suffice to make accepting its authority free, politically speaking, in the way that liberty of conscience suffices to make accepting ecclesiastical authority free. — John Rawls

Detroit had an accumulated debt of $20 billion, including a $9 billion debt with the public workers pension plans. The fact Puerto Rico and Detroit, showcased many similarities, led to speculation about the real possibility of the island's fiscal collapse. In Puerto Rico's case, at that point, the debt amounted to $71.3 billion and the local economy's structural problems were very similar to those in Detroit. The effects of the end of Section 936 in the island, the eventual economic stagnation, and the public debt, professional's emigration, and the continued reduction of the tax base have generated a sort of spiral fall. — Gustavo Velez

Migration - whether emigration or return - at the micro level is an individual choice, and government both at the Centre and the states have role only to facilitate the decision of the individuals. — Vayalar Ravi

History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems! — Charles Stross

The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration. — Thomas Malthus

Many people who are forced into emigration suffer and often die tragically; many of their rights are violated, they are obliged to separate from their families and, unfortunately, continue to be subjected to racist attitudes and xenophobia. — Pope Francis

The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession. — Primo Levi

[The proposed establishment] will have a ... tendency to banish our Citizens ... To superadd a fresh motive to emigration by revoking the liberty which they now enjoy, would be the same species of folly which has dishonoured and depopulated flourishing kingdoms. — James Madison

It is enough. This is the right place." Brigham Young uttered those words when his wagon reached the mouth of Emigration Canyon and he gazed out at this valley. — Andrew Hunt

For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward.
The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge. — Eva Hoffman

The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1 — Timothy Snyder

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. — NoViolet Bulawayo

This necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessing of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness, will point out the necessity, of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue. — Thomas Paine

People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity - we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: "shoot," "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as "arrest," "ten years without the right of correspondence,"*2 and "emigration." How — Svetlana Alexievich

Emigration tears people apart. They learn about high points and personal disasters in letters and phone calls. Closer contact is impossible. As if they have landed on another planet, breathing is difficult in the spacesuits they don't dare to take off for fear there won't be enough air in the new atmosphere. Their chests rise and fall with difficulty. Their lungs hurt. The voices of the other settlers croak through the microphones in their helmets. — Julya Rabinowich

Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

There was a time when emigration from Cuba was a definitive separation. There were no visits. In the '80s, '90s, it was incredibly difficult. I'm not the only one interested in this as a filmmaker - other Cuban filmmakers have dealt with it, too, because it's such a part of our reality. — Fernando Perez

One might well ask at this point why it should be necessary for a person to be in contact with his or her historical-spiritual roots. In Zurich we have the opportunity to analyze many Americans who come to the Jung Institute and thus to observe the symptoms and results of a hiatus in culture (emigration of their forebears) and a loss of roots. In that case we are dealing with people whose consciousness is structured similarly to ours; but when we bore into the depths, we find something that resembles a gap in the steps - no continuity! A cultivated white man - and beneath that a primitive shadow, of which the — Marie-Louise Von Franz

We shall experience the final defeat of liberalism not when immigration but when emigration is forbidden — Jo Grimond

It's the worst yet. I'm in TEFL City.'

'TEFL City' because we called those times 'TEFL-pondering mornings', when your only option felt like emigration and teaching. — Emma Jane Unsworth

Scotland's political identity was destroyed, and a huge Scottish emigration to North America followed the brutal Highland clearances. These included every layer of Scottish society, not just the remnants of the defeated clans. — Tariq Ali

The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The 'enlargement' agenda has therefore become controversial all across Europe, and I return to the controversy in what follows. — Roger Scruton

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted. — Thomas Malthus

Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains: and this constant emigration, which, in the space of two centuries, might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa. — Edward Gibbon

It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. — Martin Rees

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs. — Harold E. Varmus

People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the fucking thing. It's all fucking crap. We're all human beings, we're all mammals, we're all rocks, plants, rivers. Fucking borders are just such a pain in the fucking arse. — Shane MacGowan

... whichever of my friends was and is sensitive, touchy even, had to choose... emigration... and I emigrated inwardly, here to the pub for example... — Bohumil Hrabal

I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963. — Jon Stewart

An emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.
[ ... ] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence. — Milan Kundera

Irish demographics reveal two startling facts: There are around 70 million people worldwide who claim Irish descent, and Ireland today has barely half the population that it had 160 years ago, a decline unmatched in the modern world. These facts are explained and connected by the undeniable social reality of nineteenth-century Ireland - emigration. — Ryan Hackney

Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field; this region, so favourably distinguished by nature, now become the habitation of civilization, at a period unparalleled in history, in the midst of a raging war, and under all the disadvantages of emigration to a country so remote from the inhabited parts of the continent. — Daniel Boone

I am not facing the problem of emigration. I want my music to be acknowledged here first of all, in this country: after that, we shall see - perhaps the question will than become urgent. — Alfred Schnittke

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern. — Henry A. Kissinger

The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East. — Will Durant

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time. — John Berger

The young nobles, of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust. The religious element in the colony-unlike the former Huguenot emigration to Brazil
was evidently subordinate. The adventurers thought more of their fortunes than of their faith. — Francis Parkman

She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty. — Milan Kundera

I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you're from or what you did before. — Isabel Allende

Our house has its back to the sea,' writes Hester in her journal. 'Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better. — Tanya Moir

Many years have passed since I first discovered you. You troubled me then. You trouble me now. But mortality, like thunder, rumbles its dull way toward me. It is I who must take the step. Through the fire. And come unto you. — Caryl Phillips

American diplomats had been slow to understand the scope of the change being driven by Chinese migration to Africa. The phenomenon had been flagged in State Department cables as early as 2005, with diplomats identifying the budding, large-scale movement of people from China to Africa as part of a campaign to expand Beijing's political influence and simultaneously advance China's business interests and overall clout. These early, classified warnings also spoke of the spread, via emigration, of Chinese organized crime, particularly in smuggling and human trafficking. For the most part, however, it seemed that American diplomats were still in search of the right voice, the right message. All too often, Washington struck a paternalistic tone that came across as: Listen up children, you must be careful about these tricky Chinese. — Howard W. French

I am not (yet) facing the problem of emigration. I want my music to be acknowledged here first of all, in this country: after that, we shall see - perhaps the question will then become urgent. — Alfred Schnittke

There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again — Cole Moreton

The proposed policy [of raising the level of public service in the occupied territories] may clash with our intention to encourage emigration from both [Gaza] Strip and Judea and Samaria. Anyone who has practical ideas or proposal to encourage emigration-let him speak up. No idea or proposal is to be dismissed out of hand. — Moshe Dayan

I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer.
But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from? — Kapka Kassabova

I hear the tread of pioneers
Of nations yet to be,
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea. — John Greenleaf Whittier

On the subject of emigration, it is not my intention to dwell at any length. — Charles Sturt

Trips are part of humanity. Emigration is a part of humanity. And it's ever more dynamic due to globalization. — Fernando Perez

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. — Stefan Zweig