Quotes & Sayings About Foreigners

I love the Twins, ... I bleed the Twins. That's all I know. If I go anywhere else, I'd be a foreigner. — Torii Hunter

But I am not allowed to speak to foreigners and I am not allowed to leave the country. So I'm not so happy. — Mordechai Vanunu

Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners. — George Orwell

Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The — Barry Eisler

And this was the end of my first friendship with one of that innumerable company of people who are foreigners in their own country, but who are in reality its finest sons ... — Maxim Gorky

A lot is said, by foreigners and the left, about America being a violent society. Yet if you subtract the crime statistics for its largest cities places that have been under the strict political control of so-called "progressives", sometimes for many generations what remains, the real America, is the most peaceful, productive, prosperous, and truly progressive civilization in all of human history. — L. Neil Smith

I bet foreigners visiting the U.S. are wondering why we never use the top half of our flagpoles. — Unknown

But-but ... " Timmie's eyes couldn't get any wider.
"Why did you tell her I'm your boyfriend? Why doesn't she know about your real one?"
That was a good question. I cast around for an answer. Any answer.
"He's English!" I settled on desperately. "And Mom ... Mom hates foreigners! — Jeaniene Frost

Dating in England is different. First of all because English people don't like at all other people knowing them, and second, because English people are romantically impaired. — Angela Kiss

If things are going wrong in a country, it's not usually that we don't have enough foreigners. It's usually that we have too many. — Rory Stewart

German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. — George Bernard Shaw

Being with Ken was like being with a permanently foreign friend. It was impossible to understand them, but all you really needed to do was reflect back their own expressions. When Ken looked sad, they looked sad. When he looked happy, they smiled. It was actually very relaxing to be around him. Not much was expected. — Louise Penny

The guard looked from one to the other. His mind was soon made up. His training led him to despise foreigners, and to respect and admire well-dressed gentleman who travelled first class. — Agatha Christie

Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter. — Evan Osnos

A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner. — John Steinbeck

Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin. — Ilana Mercer

We are mortgaging ourselves to foreigners on a scale that would make George Washington cry. Every day - every single day - we borrow a billion dollars from foreigners to buy petroleum from abroad, often from countries that hate us. We are the beggars of the world, financing our lavish lifestyle by selling our family heirlooms and by enslaving our progeny with the need to service the debt. — Ben Stein

We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries. — Zahi Hawass

Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character. — Truman Capote

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life. — Eric Hoffer

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king's business. — Isaac Newton

Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The national State divides its inhabitants into three classes: State citizens, State subjects, and foreigners. It must be held in greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich even if only a crossing-sweeper, than to be a king in a foreign State. — Adolf Hitler

One thing we've learned is that there's not anything that Nigel Farage won't blame on foreigners. — Nicola Sturgeon

Even some of us who make movies underestimate their influence abroad. American movies sell American culture. Foreigners want to see American movies. But that's also why so many foreign governments and groups object to them. — Irwin Winkler

We're two of a kind, that donkey and me, said Caridad in a dreamy voice. Foreigners in our own land. I would have liked to tell her she was wrong, to point out that in the eyes of the law, I was the only foreigner, but I kept my mouth shut. I put my arm gently around her waist and waited. Caridad might have been foreign to God, to the police and even to herself, but she wasn't foreign to me. I could have said the same for the donkey. — Roberto Bolano

Now circumcision was an external mark, by which God's people were known in distinction from other nations; just as we see that every prince gives his people and army his standard and watchword, by which they are known among themselves and by which foreigners can tell, to what lord they belong. Thus God has never left his people without such a sign or watchword, by which it can outwardly be known in the world where his people are to be found. Jews are known by circumcision: that was their divine mark. Our mark is baptism and the body of Christ. — Martin Luther

[Otto von Bismarck] only considered the interests of his own country - always the worst offense that a statesman can commit in the eyes of foreigners. — A.J.P. Taylor

Thus once more I found confirmed on all sides the simple, clear, important, and practical meaning of the words of Jesus. Once more, in place of an obscure sentence, I had found a clear, precise, important, and practical rule: To make no distinction between compatriots and foreigners, and to abstain from all the results of such distinction, - from hostility towards foreigners, from wars, from all participation in war, from all preparations for war; to establish with all men, of whatever nationality, the same relations granted to compatriots. All this was so simple and so clear, that I — Leo Tolstoy

It's so cold that foreigners have to wrap in layers of fur to walk from building to building, while our natural Winterian blood keeps us warm even in the worst conditions. And snow is everywhere, always, so much that the grass beneath it is white from lack of sun. An entire kingdom wrapped in an orb of eternal winter. — Sara Raasch

With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter. But this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole. — Thomas Jefferson

Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language. — Frans G. Bengtsson

America is no longer the melting pot it used to be. It has now become a tossed salad of foreigners that arrive to our shores wanting to keep their culture and forcing our acceptance. — Jay Severin

But the silent stranger could hardly have understood what was passing: she was a German who had not long been in Russia and knew not a word of Russian, and she seemed to be as stupid as she was handsome. She was a novelty and it had become a fashion to invite her to certain parties, sumptuously attired, with her hair dressed as though for a show, and to seat her in the drawing-room as a charming decoration, just as people sometimes borrow from their friends for a special occasion a picture, a statue, a vase, or a fire-screen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. — Robert K. Massie

For these creatures(humans) are for the most part malevolent and murderous by nature, able to tolerate others only insofar as they resemble themselves, capable of slaughtering each other because of a slight difference in skin colour or appearance. Also, they cannot tolerate those who do not think as they do. Although they know perfectly well, theoretically, that the surface of the inhabited globe is divided into thousands of areas each with it system of religious or scientific belief, and although they know that it is entirely by chance that any individual among them was born into this area or that area, this or that area of belief, this theoretical knowledge does not prevent them from hating foreigners in their own particular small area, and if not harming them, isolating them in every way possible. — Doris Lessing

The stranger has no friend, unless it be a stranger. — Saadi

Hiring foreigners is more expensive and more difficult than hiring locals, because of the visa fees and long lead times for visa processing. And companies face a backlash by anti-immigrant groups for hiring foreigners. So they do it only because they have to. — Vivek Wadhwa

The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much. — Tony Benn

Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide. — David Kyuman Kim

Hollywood continues to present the U.S. Army as being the good guys, always defeating the aliens or foreigners. — Hideo Kojima

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime. — P. J. O'Rourke

Why did you tell her I'm your boyfriend? Why doesn't she know about your real one? - Timmy
He's English! And Mom ... Mom hates foreigners!
- Cat — Jeaniene Frost

Ollie was soon invited to attend public rallies and private meetings in which the crowd called for the expulsion of all foreigners from Sweden calling them parasites that sucked money and health benefits from the social security system. In fact, most of the protestors and demonstrators themselves lived on social security money while most of the immigrants were gainfully employed and paid their taxes regularly. But these facts were irrelevant since prejudice and xenophobia were dominant. — Charles Z. David

We have fluctuations all the time, business cycles, and they come about in various ways, but normally what sets them off is some reduction in the willingness of our population, our businesses, and foreigners to buy. — Robert Solow

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house. — Mary McCarthy

The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism - such as Jessfield Road, on which St. Faith's was located. — Katherine Paterson

Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him. — Yukio Mishima

Unless the trade deficit shrinks, the combination of the trade deficit and the interest and dividend payments to foreigners will grow ever more rapidly. — Martin Feldstein

At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners - this is a basic requirement of most British institutions - and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among — Bill Bryson

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. — Abraham Lincoln

The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures. — William L. Shirer

They emblazoned the cotton with the words "California Republic." Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power. The — Daniel James Brown

During the 19th century, Iranians lost vast territories in disastrous wars, and corrupt monarchs sold everything of value in the country to foreigners. — Stephen Kinzer

A nation ... is just a society for hating foreigners. — Olaf Stapledon

The reading public isn't born that doesn't think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister. — Christopher Hitchens

When foreigners come into a nation, the best way is to make them no longer foreign. That is to say, let us marry our young together and let there be children. War is costly, love is cheap. — Pearl S. Buck

Emmy and I are still Habte Sadek's favorite foreigners, and it is all because I wanted to look at his feet when I was eleven years old! But it never hurts to be polite to people. — Elizabeth Wein

Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV. — Neal Stephenson

But what must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benifet of the national privation and self denial? — Jean-Baptiste Say

Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier. — Robert Moses

Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer
a noisy but small and useless part of the national household. — P. J. O'Rourke

There were times when I consider simply taking the dagger and sinking it into his heart, I had ample opportunity after all, but I was still young and tough my hatred consumed me, I still lusted for life. I was a coward, a prisoner whose captivity was made worse by the knowledge of the vastness of his prison. Despair began to rot my heart. I fell to indulgence again, seeking escape in wine and drugs and flesh, an indulgence that would have seem me dead before long, had not the foreigners arrived. — Anthony Ryan

The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited. — Evelyn Waugh

During the years I lived here, the people of Alexandra ignored tribal and ethnic distinctions. Instead of being Xhosas, or Sothos, or Zulus, or Shangaans, we were Alexandrans. We were one people, and we undermined the distinctions that the apartheid government tried so hard to impose. It saddens and angers me to see the rising hatred of foreigners. — Nelson Mandela

Unless your government is respectable, foreigners will invade your rights; and to maintain tranquillity, it must be respectable - even to observe neutrality, you must have a strong government. — Alexander Hamilton

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live. — Octavia E. Butler

I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?
or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sadly, I hate foreigners. And Americans. And animals. And flora, and some fauna. Also the magma that is the very core of this our mother earth. I'm full o' hate! — Joss Whedon

I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice. — Christopher Isherwood

I was afterwards sorry for this, though, if I ever travel again, I shall trust to none but natives, as the climate of Africa is too trying to foreigners. — John Hanning Speke

You got warlords still running free, but yet you want a stable Liberia. You got puppets as leaders still signing off Liberia's resources to foreigners, but yet you want a developed Liberia. They are threat to a progressive Liberia. — Henry Johnson Jr

You can tell a lot about a country by observing how much better they treat themselves than foreigners at the point of entry. — Michael Lewis

I don't mind foreigners. God save the queen! he squeaked and ran. — Jeaniene Frost

Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies. — Taylor Branch

I belong to a stupid nation that kill and murder their own people for language and religion, then they call it foreigners interference. — M.F. Moonzajer

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners. — Mason Cooley

Iran's strong logic and firm diplomacy is the guideline for all government officials in negotiations on country's peaceful nuclear program with foreigners, quite resolutely. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land. — Waguih Ghali

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. — Karl Marx

Yes, Fraulein,' he said to Hannah. 'How gauche of you to have been born in another county. It is almost a capital offense. Here in this house we believe that one must be severely punished for the happenstance of one's birth.' His face was a jester's mask of mockery, but there was a tightness about his eyes, a tense set to his smile. 'What a dilemma for the English, though- we agree with Germany on so many things, including the patent inferiority of anyone who is not US. Darling Mum, did it ever occur to you that to the rest of the world, WE are foreigners?'
'The very idea!' Lady Liripip said with a nervous titter. — Laura L. Sullivan

As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners. — David Sedaris

These ways to make people buy were strange and new to us, and many bought for the sheer pleasure at first of holding in the hand and talking of something new. And once this was done, it was like opium, we could no longer do without this new bauble, and thus, though we hated the foreigners and though we knew they were ruining us, we bought their goods. Thus I learned the art of the foreigners, the art of creating in the human heart restlessness, disquiet, hunger for new things, and these new desires became their best helpers. — Han Suyin

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time. — Brian K. Vaughan

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. (1 PETER 2:11) — Lysa TerKeurst

And Cape Town is not what it used to be. Foreigners have left their imprint on our culture. — K. Sello Duiker

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners. — Randall Jarrell

From the beginning [of the film The Darkest Hour], [aliens] it's a metaphor for the foreigners and from the beginning of the movie, American boys feel themselves like aliens here or they feel like Russians are aliens. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication. Then when the real aliens appear, together they have to fight to survive. — Timur Bekmambetov

There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed. — J. William Fulbright

Foreigners are sending messages to the planets. We are sending rice and cereals to our dead fore-father through the Brahmins. It is a wise deed? — Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Nobody asks her not to understand! It's a lesson for these foreigners! — Anton Chekhov

As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking ... I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief thus laid at the door of that poor unknown quantity Thinking is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother Talking. — Vernon Lee

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight. — John Steinbeck

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles. — Terry Eagleton

I believe only foreigners should run for president ... Face it, the presidency is a lousy job. And who does lousy jobs we don't want anymore better than foreigners? — Bill Maher

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. — Michael Shaara

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? — Firoozeh Dumas

Most of us give little thought to the importance or the meaning of a homeland. Not until we ourselves are foreigners fighting for acceptance, stripped of all ranks and titles and viewed as inferiors, do we miss that privilege. — Oksana Marafioti

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. — Louis De Bernieres

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon