Top 651 Vietnamese Refugees Quotes & Sayings

How do we solve the problem by allowing a number of refugees to return to Israel, allowing a number of refugees to return to the Palestinian state, and allowing a number of refugees to settle, with general compensation, where they want to settle? It is not an abstract problem. It involves four million human beings, and more than fifty years of various sorts of misery. But it is not an insolvable problem. It involves some good will, and a readiness to give up historic myths on both sides.

There are many refugees, if not more refugees inside the country than outside the country. There is also the question of working to aid us at the present moment when we are campaigning for elections.

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth. ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country.

Politicians have been spreading fear, saying if we're letting in refugees, we're letting in terrorists. It's not the truth. We've got to recognise the difference between terrorism and people who are refugees; people who are struggling.

When there is a Palestinian state, it will absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and Lebanon, because these states will simply expel all of these refugees.

We are very proud, wherever we are in the world, to tell you about Canadian values and what we think is the right thing for Canada to do. And when it comes to refugees, we very much believe in welcoming refugees to our country, and that includes Syrian refugees, and that includes Muslim refugees.

The refugees are not only going to be a demand on the country's resources, but also the refugees raise the possibility that the countries that they're going to are themselves not as stable as the citizens would like, I think. We're all just one catastrophe away from ending up as a refugee, and we don't want to be reminded of that.

I was a Vietnamese kid with a mullet hair cut. I had all Westie mates, and, geez, a Vietnamese guy with a mullet doesn't work; no wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend for so many years.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight Bill was that it gave President [Barack] Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees without mandating any background checks whatsoever. Now we've seen what happened in San Bernardino. When you are letting people in, when the FBI can't vet them, it puts American citizens at risk.

One of my best friends growing up was Vietnamese, and he and his mom would teach me how to say certain things so I could impress my nail girls. Then the nail girls would teach me how to count to 100 and basic things like 'Thank you' and 'You're welcome.' It's funny, because any accent that I do now always turns into Vietnamese.

The West and its media have barely covered the recent wave of repression in Turkey. The reason is simple. They are paying billions to Ankara to control and take back the refugees of the Syrian war. They are fearful that if they offend Tayyip Erdogan he will use the refugees as a political weapon. So they keep quiet.

I'm working on this fashion line that's all inspired by Vietnam. I'm Vietnamese so a lot of the clothes are inspired by Vietnamese culture, and I'm trying to mix that with the streetwear style.

Cubans who arrive and can prove that they are refugees who are truly fleeing political persecution will continue to qualify as refugees. The only thing that I've asked for is to do away with automatic benefits granted to someone, basically, Cubans who come from Cuba, if it cannot be verified that they are refugees fleeing political persecution, so they will be treated the same way as any other immigrant who arrives in the United States, which is that legal immigrants in the United States don't have the right to any federal benefits for five years.

The Chinese describe themselves as political refugees. Many base that claim on China's strict population laws, which allow them to have only one child. But if we accept them as bona fide political refugees for that reason, doesn't it follow that people living in countries where abortion is illegal (such as Ireland and Poland) should also receive political asylum? After all, their country's policy is forcing them to give birth to unwanted children.

On the Gang of Eight bill, there was no provisions really for extra scrutiny or safety for refugees. At the time the bill came up, two Iraqi refugees came to my home town, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Their fingerprints were on a bomb from Iraq. They were in the database, but we didn't pick them up.

President [Barack] Obama and Hillary Clinton are proposing bringing tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to this country when the head of the FBI has told Congress they cannot vet those refugees.

Every chance at destabilizing [Bashar] Assad... the bombing campaign causes a flood of refugees into Jordan, there's already half a million in Jordan. I think a bombing campaign - I think it's hard to argue that a U.S. bombing campaign is going to cause less refugees. And I think it causes more refugees and more of a humanitarian disaster. I think it causes, or allows, the risk of Israel being attacked with a gas attack to go up, if we attack Assad. So there's all kinds of bad things.

We often discuss housing refugees, but not how you help return refugees back to their home countries. As a result, in a post-disaster or post-conflict situation, we end up with intractable refugee camps that end up staying for decades.

I embrace both my Vietnamese and American sides, 100 percent.

Vietnam is no longer a war, it's a country. I think that that's very important to understand. And the Vietnamese - last time a poll was taken, somewhere above 80 percent of Vietnamese people have a very positive outlook towards the United States.

The United States has already experienced the danger of flawed refugee vetting as well as the potential for refugees to be radicalized once they are here. In 2011, two Iraqi refugees were arrested in Kentucky for conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals abroad in support of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIL.

We moved in to help the Vietnamese defend their country and confront the Viet Cong.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.

I never take for granted how lucky I am to be an American and what a privilege it is to spend each day at a nonprofit dedicated to helping the next generation of girls achieve their dreams. My journey, as the daughter of refugees, shows what refugees and the children of refugees can create for all Americans.

If you look at the movement of refugees, in Vladimir Lenin's phrase, "the people who voted with their feet," the movement of refugees until comparatively modern times was overwhelmingly from West to East, not from East to West. Refugees of all kinds were constantly fleeing from Christendom to the Islamic lands. Jews of course and Muslims of course, but even some Christians and the movement of refugees went overwhelmingly that way.

I grew up around Vietnamese refugees, around people who don't speak English as a first language.

Now people are criticizing Europe, the European Commission, Juncker and the whole lot because the distribution of refugees didn't succeed immediately. But you also have to recognize that close to 20,000 refugees have already been redistributed. There are only a few member states that do not want to take part.

Only 4 percent of the people who live here [Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania] are actually foreign-born. And even fewer of those are refugees. So there's not a whole lot of experience with refugees here.

My parents would dress us up in traditional Vietnamese clothing to go to school for heritage day. We have a Vietnamese nanny that my parents wanted us to have so we could stay in touch and know where we came from.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

Cubans must prove that they're political refugees. And if they can prove that they're really fleeing persecution, well, they would qualify as refugees.

I have been involved with the UN refugee agency for a few years now, and we have done events to speak about refugees, focusing more and more on the situation with Afghan refugees.

I've been to Vietnam and mainland China. Even though the Vietnamese are seemingly poor, they always stop in front of red traffic lights and walk in front of green ones. Even though mainland China's GDP is higher than that of Vietnam, if you ask me about culture, the Vietnamese culture is superior.

There are many war refugees and three times as many climate refugees. All of them are people who can no longer live where they were born. I hope we face reality in time to save ourselves. We will all be migrants soon.

The crimes committed by the North Vietnamese regime against the Vietnamese people were minor compared to the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodians, but for us on the left they were emotionally far more significant.

The fact is that the Vietnamese held Americans after 1973.

We are also assisting the refugees who have fled across the border to Chad. As many of them have been subject to attacks by militia crossing from Sudan, UNHCR is mounting a major logistical operation to establish camps and transfer refugees away from the border zone.

It's inspiring to see Black Flag looking like Vietnamese farmers with big beards and those kind of Vietnamese farming hats showing up at a Mohawk-mania club in England and being spat at because they don't sound or look like Exploited; they sound more like Black Sabbath than Black Flag. I love that.

Refugees, especially in their early years, are still caught up in the experience that made them refugees. And they're much more melancholic. They're much more oriented towards the past and towards the country of origin. That can make the process of becoming a part of the new country much more fraught for them.

Refugees come from many different backgrounds and live in many different circumstances, so I wouldn't like to generalise. But I think refugees from the U.K. would probably be healthier and better fed than those from many other countries.

I speak Vietnamese and conversational Spanish.

You can bring your enemies to their knees with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese.

I get called "ISIS" now. Why don't we have a name-and-shame weapons dealership website? Instead, we're like, "Oh my God, are you really talking about the refugees again, making yourself into a caricature?" And it's like, "Until you stop the person in your country who's making billions of dollars from selling weapons, yeah, I have to talk about refugees." Whatever I say will get twisted or messed with.

40, 50 years ago, Americans - the majority of Americans did not want to accept these Vietnamese refugees who they saw as completely foreign. Now there are new foreigners - Syrians and other people from the Middle East, people of Muslim backgrounds. And the sense among many Americans is, well, these people are completely different from us, and they're not like the Vietnamese who are much more assimilable. And I think that's very, very doubtful. I think that the majority of these new foreigners, if given the opportunity, will be able to assimilate and deal with American culture.

I believe firmly in reconciliation among Vietnamese to avoid unnecessary shedding of the blood of Vietnamese.

And just as there was something of every Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh so there is something of Ho Chi Minh in almost every present-day Vietnamese, so strong is his imprint on the Vietnamese nation.

In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees.

When I came to the United States in 1975 I was eleven, and within a few months my voice broke. I recited commercials like a parrot and I got yelled at quite often. My older brother one night said, "You speak so much English when you're not supposed to, that's why your vocal chords shattered. Now you sound like a duck." I thought it was true. I went from this sweet-voiced Vietnamese kid who spoke Vietnamese and French to this craggy-voiced teenager.

We couldn't keep ten million refugees on our soil; we couldn't tolerate such an unstable situation for who knows how long. That influx of refugees wouldn't have stopped - on the contrary. It would have gone on and on and on, until there would have been an explosion. We were no longer able to control the arrival of those people, in our own interest we had to stop it! That's what I said to Mr.[Richard] Nixon, to all the other leaders I visited in an attempt to avert the war.

We are a continent of refugees, and if you say we can't integrate refugees, that's not consistent with our values, even if borders cannot be wide open.

The 21 Arab states that could easily have absorbed the original 650,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 refused to do so, even though their combined land mass was 700 times greater than that possessed by Israel. By contrast, the Jewish population of the new state was only 600,000, yet Israel willingly absorbed some 820,000 Jewish refugees from Europe.

When food becomes scarce, refugees often turn to desperate measures to feed themselves and their families. We are particularly worried about the health of the refugee population, domestic violence and refugees resorting to illegal employment or even to prostitution, just to put enough food on the table.

The screening in the United States is the toughest screening of any country in the world in terms of refugees, that accepts refugees. And of course there are those that don`t accept any, or ever have, no matter what kind they are.

Refugees are threatening, not just to Americans, but also in many countries the world over. And it's partially because, unlike immigrants, refugees do not choose where they're going to go or why they're fleeing, and they are unwanted populations. They bring with them the stigma of disaster.

My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money.

We lived in St. Tropez when I was young, and there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees in France at the time, after the war. My mother had many Vietnamese friends who entertained a lot, and she was taught how to make that spring roll. She would make them all the time.

As far as the refugees are concerned, it's not that America doesn't want to accept refugees.t's that we may not be able to, because this is an issue we have to be 100 percent right on. If we allow 9,999 Syrian refugees into the United States, and all of them are good people, but we allow one person in who's an ISIS killer - we just get one person wrong, we've got a serious problem.

Immigrants who come to a country are going to lose something, for sure, but they hope to gain a great deal by making this journey, whereas refugees by definition have lost a tremendous amount - not just country and society, but also more personal things like careers, prestige, status, relatives, identities. This inevitably makes the longing to remember the past even more powerful among refugees, to the point of often debilitating them.

As children my grandparents were refugees. Eventually they got to the U.S. - in 1950 or something. They grew up as refugees. Their earliest memories are of living in a home with their family. It's in my blood, I guess, to have a fear about encouraging fascism.

The influence of Sun Tzu on other North Vietnamese military strategists is harder to answer. Certainly many of the key leaders in Hanoi were aware of Sun Tzu and made use of his ideas - Vo Nguyen Giap applied many of these ideas in seeking out weak elements in the enemy's defenses, as did Truong Chinh, whose famous treatise, The Resistance Will Win (1947), cited the ideas of Mao Zedong as a model for the North Vietnamese to follow.