Quotes About Identity

We pulled into Spago and let the valet have the car. Lucy suggested that I wear my Groucho Marx nose as a disguise to prevent adoring fans from mobbing me, but I pointed out that then everyone might think I was Groucho Marx and I would be mobbed anyway. I decided to risk going as myself.

We're not so different." The girl burst out laughing. "Ohmigod! Oh my God—dude! Maybe you're high!" Pike put the car in gear, but kept his foot on the brake. Their sameness seemed obvious. "You want to be seen; me, I want to be invisible. It's all the same." The girl stared at him, then straightened herself the way he had straightened himself. She said, "An idealist.

they could use in an identity search. "Six feet, one ninety

Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.

The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees

People need to discover their ethnic roots as an anchor in the face of a more cosmopolitan world.

For it is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography.

The United States is virtually an island nation bordered by two oceans and the thinly peopled Canadian Arctic to the north. Only to its south is it threatened by the forces of Mexican demography.)

Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.

state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

Realism is alien to the American tradition

Robert D. Kaplan

This is to be a landscape meditation about America's place in the world.

Because of the creation of a global middle class in the intervening decades, everyone the world over looks and acts increasingly similar. In this sense at least, travel has lost its magic; or, rather, I should say the traveler must now work harder to understand the mystery of places given that travel relies on the differences between us.

Romania, as I am forced to refer to it, constitutes one of those indigestible ethnic nations, like Georgia and Armenia, that have miraculously survived the millennia despite being oppressed, overrun, and vanquished.

We are a people who deny publicly that we are even partially in the Balkans, but we admit our Balkan identity privately, among ourselves.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else," explained the philosopher Patapievici.

Oman is an example of how globalization at its best is built on vigorous localisms that can survive the onslaught of destructive commercial forces.

Our skin, our hair, and our eyes are simply the shell that surrounds our soul, and our soul is who we are. What counts is on the inside.

I've accepted it, Mom. I've accepted who I am. Okay? I'm not a kid who's going to get picked to play kickball, or to be the lead in the school play. I'm not going to be invited to parties or be chosen class valedictorian. I'm not. And I'm okay with that." It sounded convincing, though I wasn't okay with it. It hurt like hell, rejection. And the pain lingered like an open wound that, just as it started healing, was ripped open again.

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing; Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.

People need symbols, something greater than their own lives.

Si [...] estamos dispuestos a renunciar a la idea de quién creemos ser cada uno, no habrá oposición alguna entre ambos.

Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.