Mark Twain - Aeschylus - Alan Clark - Quentin Crisp - Max von Sydow - Paul Gascoigne - Roman Polanski - Isabel Allende - Eric Idle - G K Chesterton - Ali ibn Abi Talib - Robert Tressell -
We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign – foreign from top to bottom – foreign from center to circumference - foreign inside and outside and all around – nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness – nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! in Tangier we have found it. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad ch8
Why will people be so stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons? Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Everyone’s quick to blame the alien. Aeschylus c. 525 – 456 B.C.
I’d rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of fucking foreigners. Alan Clark
I don’t hold with abroad, and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned. Quentin Crisp
Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys. Max von Siddow
Then all the foreigners started coming over. I don’t mind that but a lot of teams are laying out fortunes for ordinary players and that’s no good for our youngsters coming through. Paul Gascoigne
In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it’s on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent. Roman Polanski
I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the US. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family. ibid.
I like being a foreigner. For me, to live in California is very pleasant – I’m more comfortable not feeling a part of everything, not feeling responsible for the government or the roads or the health system. Eric Idle
There is no harm in our criticizing foreigners, if only we would also criticize ourselves. In other words, the world might need even less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old humility. G K Chesterton, What I Saw in America
A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country. Ali ibn Abi Talib
The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of foreign merchandise imported into this country, the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. These were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist