“So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.”

“To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.”

“Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.”

“I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .”

“High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.”

“America's obsession with defining homosexuality by its third syllable contrasts sharply with more human exercises from Europe.”