Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety and a better future. It is part of the social fabric, part of our very make-up as a human family — Ban Ki-moon
Migration - whether emigration or return - at the micro level is an individual choice, and government both at the Centre and the states have role only to facilitate the decision of the individuals. — Vayalar Ravi
I think migration is a right, but it should be an option, not an obligation. — Nayib Bukele
History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another. — Ellsworth Huntington
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot. — Salman Rushdie
A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted. — Thomas Malthus
Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers. — Ellsworth Huntington
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery. — Jack Paar
As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones. — Bruce Chatwin
Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries. — A. B. Yehoshua
What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land. — Che Guevara
I think that people should come to Australia through the front door, not through the back door. If people want a migration outcome, they should go through the migration channels. — Tony Abbott
Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity — Pope Francis
Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind. — Fred Rogers
Short Migration Quotes
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation. — Ronald Reagan
Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me. — Carlos Fuentes
Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life. — John F. Kennedy
She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes — Jonathan Safran Foer
Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment. — Maya Angelou
All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood. — Mohsin Hamid
I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling. — Ivy Compton-Burnett
Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed. — Paul Collier
Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. — Carl Sandburg
Bird Migration Quotes
We must force the government to stop the bird migration. We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops... and force migratory birds to stay where they are. — Vladimir Zhirinovsky
Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing. — Doug Coupland
Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing. — Douglas Coupland
As I began researching butterflies, however, the monarch stood out among all of them. It's the only butterfly - the only insect - that migrates like a bird or a whale! — Mary Alice Monroe
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children. — Thomas Merton
Most of the birds of the Old World can be found here, as Oman is on a strategic route for migrating birds. — Saadi Shirazi
But human borders mean nothing to air, water, windblown soil or seeds or migrating fish, birds or mammals. — David Suzuki
My soul was always so full of aspirations, that a God was a necessity to me. I was like a bird with an instinct of migration upon me, and a country to migrate to was as essential as it is to the bird — Hannah Whitall Smith
Everything move...you wonder how it all knows where to go. Einstein wondered how birds knew where to migrate to. He thought they might follow lines of light in the sky. He saw everything as lines of light. That's how he was built. So we don't know how he moved, either. Any more than the birds. — Geoff Ryman
I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Human Migration Quotes
We can't deter people fleeing for their lives. They will come. The choice we have is how well we manage their arrival, and how humanely. — Antonio Guterres
The human soul has sojourned in lower and higher forms, migrating from one to another according to the samskaras or impressions, but it is only in the highest form as a human being that it attains to freedom. — Swami Vivekananda
I simply don't understand the refugee crisis. The history of humanity can be told through a story of migration and settlement. If I can't protect my family, I'm coming to where you are; I'm just coming. It's a round world, and we've all got to get on with it and move on. — Paul Bettany
Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start. — Gretel Ehrlich
The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die. — Stephen King
A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree. — Gretel Ehrlich
The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward. — Ellsworth Huntington
We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s. — Mohsin Hamid
I think the idea of migration through time is very important because every human being does that and it unites us with people who migrate through geography. — Mohsin Hamid
"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience. — Hassan Blasim
Transmigration Quotes
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness. — Sholem Asch
The three essentials of Hinduism are belief in God, in the Vedas as revelation, in the doctrine of Karma and transmigration. — Swami Vivekananda
If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth. — Franz Kafka
The doctrine of transmigration was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man; none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity. — Thomas Huxley
Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth. — Franz Kafka
I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school until junior high. I don't believe in transmigration or anything like that. I have resentment for being forced to believe in something. I will always think of the church as an institution and not a comfort. — Alice Glass
Pythagoras used to say that he had received as a gift from Mercury the perpetual transmigration of his soul, so that it was constantly transmigrating and passing into all sorts of plants or animals. — Diogenes Laertius
If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being. — Sallust
More and more good actors are now transmigrating into the videogame space and playing roles there because it's where my generation of kids get stories from. — Andy Serkis
This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages — James G. Frazer
Immigration Quotes
Now, some of the most dangerous places for women to be in the world are modern, Western, rich European countries. Why? One reason. Islamic immigration - it's got to stop. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
Hillary Clinton has shown no indication whatsoever of stemming the tide of Islamic immigration, or stopping our mollycoddling, and pandering to Islam. These things are direct threats. Not just to culture, but to the lives of gay people in America. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Western culture is what is at risk from immigration from the Middle East. — Milo Yiannopoulos
When I ran I was a first candidate to talk about how immigration was going be so damaging to the American people. When I first ran I talked about affirmative-action. — David Duke
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. — Enoch Powell
The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges... — George Washington
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. — Theodore Roosevelt
I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. — George Washington
Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. — Theodore Kaczynski
Emigration Quotes
Palestine is Arab and must be liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who emigrated to the land of Palestine must leave. — Saddam Hussein
The emigrants although of different parties and different religious sects all flew from persecution in pursuit of liberty. — James Monroe
Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants. — Balaji Srinivasan
My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn’t. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life. — Marco Rubio
Even skeptical emigres clued in to OGPU methods wanted to believe their homeland could somehow be seized back from the godless, barbaric Bolsheviks, and speculated endlessly about a Napoleon figure to lead a patriotic movement, mentioning most often Mikhail Tukhachevsky. — Stephen Kotkin
My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England. — Alan Bradley
The perpetual struggle for room and food. — Thomas Malthus
On the subject of emigration, it is not my intention to dwell at any length. — Charles Sturt
Many people who are forced into emigration suffer and often die tragically; many of their rights are violated, they are obliged to separate from their families and, unfortunately, continue to be subjected to racist attitudes and xenophobia. — Pope Francis
But very unfortunately the merchant marine died away till even the majority of fishing done about the Cape is in the hands of the Portuguese who emigrated to the Cape some fifty years ago. — Joseph C. Lincoln
I think those who say that you can't tango if you are not Argentine are mistaken. Tango was an immigrant music... so it does not have a nationality. It's only passport is feeling. — Carlos Gavito
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time. — J. G. Ballard
From the early days of European migration to America, in the 17th Century, the prototype of buildings was based on English precedent, even if mostly translated into the locally available material in abundance: timber. — Harry Seidler
So if people have an opportunity for a decent job, a decent education, a decent health care system and security, I know that forceful migration will be reduced to zero. —
If the U.S. government is serious about fighting irregular migration, it should support and encourage legal migration. — Nayib Bukele
For hundreds of years Iranians have been migrating to many parts of the world. They took Islamic culture to other parts of the world and established it there. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The new line is that, yes, totally out-of-control migration is with us forever; yes, it is leading to social breakdown and chaos in Europe; but if we adopt ‘new ideas’ everything is going to be just fine. Historians will look back and laugh, won’t they? — Philip Pilkington
Let me explain something you already know. I'm from Texas and we understand the nature of a border. From what I've seen, vigilant Texans are being ordered to stand down and allow criminals to pass. Mr. President, prepare to see Texans ignoring those orders. — Tommy Lee Jones
There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. — P. J. O'Rourke
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered — Franz Boas
People don't flee their homes because they want to, people flee their homes because they feel they have to. Why? Because they don't have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don't have basic things like water, education, health. — Nayib Bukele
There are certain things that we take for granted that simply would not have existed without the great migration. Motown, for example, would not have existed - it simply would not, because Berry Gordy, the founder of it, his parents had migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he founded Motown, and where did he get his talent? — Isabel Wilkerson
If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality. — Aviva Chomsky
Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum. — Bunker Roy
Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to. — Douglas Rushkoff
So if Arizona sees the federal government isn't assuming its responsibilities, it creates local laws. But migration and keeping security on the borders is not a local or state issue, it's a federal issue. — Vicente Fox
What, after all, is the narrative of the American Dream? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. — Naomi Wolf
More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship…. — Sebastiao Salgado
We have a Conservative leader that believes in green taxes, that won't bring back grammar schools, that believes in continuing with total open-door migration from eastern Europe and refuses to give us a referendum on the EU. — Nigel Farage
Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated. — Isabel Wilkerson
I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually. — Isabel Wilkerson
What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude. — Isabel Wilkerson
Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history. — Oscar Handlin
History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner. — Claudio Magris
There is no such thing as a Difficult Piece. A piece is either impossible - or it is easy.
The process whereby it migrates from one category to the other is known as practicing. — Louis Kentner
People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America. — Mary Pipher
The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples. — Lyndon B. Johnson
We are in the middle of a tough, ideological conflict that is being waged across the entire continent. On the one side are those who say that global challenges like migration and terror cannot be met with national parochialism. On the other side are those who would like to see a renaissance of the nation-state. — Martin Schulz
As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal. — James Wolcott
[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat. — Yitzhak Rabin
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of migration quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about migration to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of migration quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
