Immigrants To The United States

"While California remains the state with the largest Vietnamese population, the percentage of Vietnamese living in California decreased during the 1990s. The downward trend of the electronics industry in which many Vietnamese were employed, coupled with unaffordable housing, prompted the departures. Economic growth in places like Texas, Florida and Louisiana attracted a great number of Vietnamese."

"Vietnamese-Americans who came to the U.S. as refugees more than 40 years ago and their children are mobilizing to help Afghans with whom they feel a kinship at the chaotic end of another lengthy war in Asia."

"Our parents have been seen as a generation that was just trying to survive in many ways ... and our generation is seen as going past this idea of surviving, but really thriving. And by thriving, I think we're able to speak up."

"In the years since the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese Americans – particularly the older generation – have typically aligned themselves with the Republican party because of the GOP’s fervent anti-communist stance dating back to the war."

"In San Jose, the new Vietnamese community was bolstered by access to Asian markets in the area, that had already been established by other immigrant families from Asia. In this way, the Vietnamese community developed less as an enclave and more as an integrated, borderless part of the larger San Jose area."

"If I do not say that you were defeated by the communists in Vietnam, I must modestly say that you did not win either. But you found an honourable way out. And at present, when our army lacks weapons, ammunition, helicopters, aircraft and B-52s (bombers), you ask us to do an impossible thing, like filling up the ocean with stones…"

"Likewise, you have let our soldiers die under the hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally. Refusing to aid an ally and abandoning it is an inhumane act…"

"You say that you blame me for the fall of South Vietnam, you criticize me, everything. I let you do that. I like to see you do better than I."

"When democracy is recovered in Vietnam, I can say that my dream has come true. I can go back to my life. I would like to go back to my own province, my native province. That’s the best place."

"Of course, I would like to go down in history as the man who brought peace."

"When you negotiate with the Communists, you shouldn't fix a deadline. You must not tell them that you want to repatriate the prisoners as soon as possible, to bring peace as soon as possible, otherwise they exploit you. Be patient. One must be patient with the Communists, more patient than they are."

"The Americans have asked us to do an impossible thing… You have asked us to do something you failed to do, with half a million powerful troops and skilled commanders, and with nearly $300 billion in expenditure over six long years."

"The United States is proud of being an invincible defender of the just cause and the ideal of freedom in the world… Are US statements worthy? Are US commitments still valid?"

"Until today we have had a half war. I say, had we attacked North Vietnam with a classical war, had we bombed North Vietnam continuously, had we landed in North Vietnam, the war would be over by now."

"It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend."

"Don't listen to what the Communists say, but look at what they do."

"I have always said we are not afraid of a ceasefire, but our stance is that if there is a cease‐fire it must go along with a political settlement."

"The Communists could only hope to win if our ally betrays us and sells us out. But our main ally will never betray us. He has invested so much blood and money."

"With mRna I can get my muscle cells to start producing Epo. And even if Epo degrades after two hours and mRna degrades after five days, once you have produced red blood cells they last up to three hundred days. I'm working on an anticancer idea: injecting an mRna into the tumor that prompts the cancer cells to do something that gets the attention of the immune system: release cytokines. It's like saying to the immune cells, "Come here! Come here!"."

"Nguyen Van Thieu and his machine of oppression and constraint, instruments of the U.S. “Vietnamization” policy, constitute the main obstacle to the settlement of the political problem in South Vietnam. Therefore, Nguyen Van Thieu must resign immediately, the Saigon administration must end its warlike policy, disband at once its machine of oppression and constraint against the people, stop its “pacification” policy, disband the concentration camps, set free those persons arrested on political grounds and guarantee to the people the democratic liberties as provided for by the 1954 Geneva agreements on Vietnam. After the above has been achieved, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam will immediately discuss with the Saigon administration the formation of a three-segment government of national concord with a view to organizing general elections in South Vietnam, to elect a constituent assembly, work out a constitution, and set up a definitive government of South Vietnam. The general elections will be held according to procedures agreed upon among the political forces in South Vietnam so as to ensure effectively their free, democratic and fair character."

"The idea was to give our cells, thanks to messenger Rna (mRna), the instructions to produce proteins capable of curing diseases. ... with RNA he can make his cells produce that protein continuously for 2-3 days and everything is resolved."

"I believe that we cannot survive as a democratic country when we are supporting someone like Thieu in Saigon, who has put 300,000 political prisoners in jail because they've spoken in favor of peace. I just don't believe that when a Republican Party bugs the Democratic Party headquarters, that that smacks of democracy. These kind of things I speak out against. That doesn't mean I'm a Communist."

"In the American university system you are not salaried: you have to bring the funding for your research, winning scholarships. I kept trying, but my questions were turned down. My research colleagues understood that I was working on interesting things and they subsidized me until the beautiful age of 58. I left the University of Pennsylvania after 24 years of work, without ever having had a proposal for a professorship or a permanent contract."

"In any peace solution the final decision should be ours. Nobody can sign a cease‐fire agreement or peace settlement without the signature of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam."

"We have told the Americans, that when you talk to the Communists, if they propose this or that solution, you just receive it and take it back and show it to us. Then we would give our views and you would inform them of our views."

"Yes, I'm a military man, and as a military man I say that if peace fails and we want to end this war, we must bring the war to North Vietnam. In all possible ways, including landing."

"Some $300 million is not a big sum to you. Compared to the amount of money you spent here in ten years, this sum is sufficient for only ten days of fighting. And with this sum, you ask me to score a victory or to check communist aggression, a task which you failed to fulfil in six years, with all US forces, and with such an amount of money. This is absurd."

"The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men."

"Every night I was working: grant, grant, grant. And it came back always no, no, no."

"It’s my love for cinema that fuels my work. If there is one thing then, that, as a scholar, as a film buff, I have always loved to do, it is to go and look for the origins and inspirations of films, and of course I am not referring only to horror. Understanding the influences that determined certain choices. Also, to understand myself, to understand how I work and how I assemble ideas and solutions. It is said that the language of cinema is cinema, and it is very true. Everything comes from something else: it is a collection of ever-changing pieces of a mosaic. I have never studied cinema academically or from a theoretical point of view and, consequently, I have always advanced on the basis of my intuitions and instincts, which might be naïve, but also genuine"

"Our first precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The social and economic conditions of the target country must be such as to confine political participation to a small fraction of the population... The second precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The target state must be substantially independent, and the influence of foreign powers in its internal political life must be relatively limited... The third precondition of the coup, therefore, is: The target state must have a political center. If there are several centers, these must be identifiable, and they must be politically, rather than ethnically, structured. If the state is controlled by a nonpolitically organized unit, the coup can only be carried out with its consent or neutrality."

"An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat."

"Yes, you can convert [Afghanistan] into Sweden, but you'll need four hundred years, and you have to kill three quarters of the males in Afghanistan probably in three generations, one after the other, to be able to do it."

"Perfectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods. It is enough to consider these methods to see why the armed forces of the United States or of any other democratic country cannot possibly use them."

"735 days in North Korea was long enough. But I’m thankful."

"You work nose to the grindstone to get your foot in the door and establish yourself in this industry, but there’s never a guarantee–never an absolute certainty that your efforts will be rewarded in the way you envision. But, I do believe that so long as you’ve got the work ethic and tenacity, you’ll at least be ready when the opportunity arrives."

"I think there are pluses and minuses to the emergence of Asian cinema in America. It's about time that a lot of these films got recognized because there are very talented people behind them - the directors, actors, writers. I don't think it is a coincidence that a lot of stories from Asia are being remade by American studios. They are really interesting stories and deserve to be shown here."

"Be proud to be Asian. Be proud to be American. You've earned the right to be both and we can all work together to be a united America. That's the hope. That's the dream."

"You know, someone once said that we have, you know, a privilege card, because we are not necessarily African American or Latinx. And part of that privilege card has been perpetuated this idea, the model minority myth. But what we've been finding is that in times of stress that privilege card gets taken away very quickly and then we're reduced to someone--to a group of people who is considered other and not American."

"There is as much wisdom in listening as there is in speaking - and that goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones."

"It takes facing obstacles to grow strong enough to overcome them."

"As someone of Korean descent, I am certain my road was a bit hard. I have to say anyone who's an aspiring actor has a difficult road regardless of race."

"Rotations in 3-dimensional Euclidean space ... form the poster child of group theory and are almost indispensable in physics. Think of rotating a rigid object, such as a bust of Newton. After two rotations in succession, the bust, being rigid, has not been deformed in any way; it merely has a different orientation. Thus, the composition of two rotations is another rotation."

"Although group theory is certainly relevant for nineteenth-century physics, it really started to play an important role with the work of Lorentz and Poincaré, and became essential with quantum mechanics. Heisenberg opened up an entirely new world with his vision of an internal symmetry, the exploration of which continues to this day in one form or another. Beginning in the 1950s, group theory has come to play a central role in several areas of physics, perhaps none more so than in what I call fundamental physics ..."

"Normally, the entropy of a system is extensive, that is, proportional to its volume. Somehow, a black hole has an entropy proportional to its surface rather than to its volume. This fact has led to the so-called holographic principle. Many fundamental physicists believe that this mysterious property of black holes holds the key to quantum gravity."

"It's one thing to talk about lack of diversity and lack of representation. But that doesn't matter if you're not good at what you're supposed to be doing."

"But there’s no doubt it stung when I felt like the people I was trying to respect and please the most were the ones who were critical of me. It was painful because, as my career since then has borne out, I take a great deal of pride in being Korean American. I know that not every representation is 100 percent something we can stand behind all the time, but I choose to look at things as whether they’re moving the needle of progress on a larger scale."

"I think any time you have an ensemble of actors, everyone’s objectives are unique and individual. So it’s hard for me to collectively say whether they were allies in this…. I do know that the way things got spun by the end changed my relationships with them."

"Alone we are much weaker than if we are allied with others who care, not just about Asian Americans, but about the issue of hate and discrimination and bigotry in general. Now I wouldn’t deign to try and compare the Asian American experience to any other minorities’ experience in America, because each one is unique in their own ways. But what we do have in common is that we have all experienced bigotry. We have all experienced prejudice. What’s most important to understand is that this is a human issue. This is not just an Asian American one."

"The fact that you have representation on TV means that you can have an understanding of someone who doesn’t necessarily look like you and that understanding can bring acceptance and empathy. And so that’s why it’s important to have a positive but fully fleshed out portrayals of Asian Americans in the media."