Quotes About Integration

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

It is important for me that a certain depth and variety of both exist next to each other. I am very careful not to sacrifice the one for the other.

When thinking through who to bring together to generate new ideas, it is more effective to combine specialists from very different and unrelated disciplines rather than a variety of people with different skills sets in the same field.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.

In the future, there are going to be various components of doing business that have to be looked at.

It's not that the system is broken, but clearly there are ways to improve the system, strengthen it, to make sure that we can put together the various bits and pieces of information in a way that allows us to stop every single terrorist out there.

Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.

If you look back through history, you'll see that God, in any form - Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed - has always wanted prosperity for everyone. There was a recognition of the need to integrate our material and spiritual lives. But that message was distorted by various leaders with their own agendas.

Country town to the city heart, in every corner of the globe you'll find a Chinatown, a Chinese restaurant or an Asian grocer. From this vast and ancient culture, we credit noodles, dumplings, rice, countless spices and cooking techniques to have enriched every culture that they've landed in.

More than 90% of Chinese believe themselves to be Han. Of course, such a vast population is derived from countless different races, but because China has enjoyed such a long and continuous history as a polity, there has been thousands of years of mixing, melding and assimilation.

The factual reality is that the vast majority of immigrants - legal and illegal - contribute more to this country than they take out in social services.

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.

The vast majority of immigrants - regardless of the conditions of war and poverty that may wrack their home countries - come and contribute to their new home country: building our roads, caring for our homes, children, and elders, and serving as doctors, lawyers, employers, and innovators.

People are always asking, 'Where does Michael Pennington end and Johnny Vegas begin,' and you're going, 'It's not like that: it's blurred right across.'

When I arrived in Las Vegas, I felt I was embraced by it.

The key with autonomous is the whole ecosystem. One of the keys to having truly fully autonomous is vehicles talking to each other.

We are not a land of Islam. In our country, we don't wear djellaba clothing, we don't wear a veil, and we don't impose cathedral-sized mosques.

A full body veil is hindering integration.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

Venues had segregated seating - but when Chuck Berry fused together blues, boogie-woogie and country music, it caused people not to be able to sit still. They bounced up out of their seats, knocking over ropes, dancing together.

Back in the day, prior to rock and roll, music halls, concert venues were segregated if they allowed black people in at all. You know, there were ropes that went around the sitting sections with signs hanging that would say, 'Sitting for white patrons only,' or 'Colored sitting only.'

Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such.

I can't imagine what Vermont, or our country, would look like today, had we refused to allow immigrants from all reaches of the world to experience this wonderful country the way most of us have, simply because they were not born here or didn't share our exact religious view.