These migration quotes will inspire you. Migration is the seasonal movement of a complete population of animals from one area to another or movement from one part of something to another.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging migration quotes, migration sayings, and migration proverbs.
Best Migration Quotes
- “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
- “We cannot and should not stop people from migration. We have to give them a better life at home. Migration is a process, not a problem.” ~ William L. Swing
- “History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.” ~ Ellsworth Huntington
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“Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “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
- “All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.” ~ Mohsin Hamid , Human migration quotes
- “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
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“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
- “Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed.” ~ Paul Collier
- “Migration is a feature of globalization. You can’t stop it; so every time a political party says it is going to be tough on immigration, it fails to deliver and loses trust.” ~ Margaret Hodge
- “I think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have.” ~ Mohsin Hamid
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“Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.” ~ Carlos Fuentes
- “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 , Birds migration quotes
- “Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.” ~ Ronald Reagan
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“I’m a big believer that as much as possible, and there’s obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.” ~ Bill Gates
- “Actually what is happening in the twenty-first century, this is the great century of migration, so we have people from all around the globe going all over the place, and they have to integrate into a society, that society that exists has to integrate with them. Both sides have to work at it. It’s not a one-way thing.” ~ Roma Tearne
- “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
- “Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers.” ~ Ellsworth Huntington
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“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.” ~ Claudio Magris
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “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
- “Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don’t feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.” ~ Junot Diaz
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“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
- “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
- “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ~ Emma Lazarus
- “If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems.” ~ Michael Franti
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“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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Spirit can go anywhere. In fact, it has to go places so it can change and emerge like in the migrations. That’s the whole idea.” ~ William Least Heat-Moon
- “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
- “I wonder the human race has been so fond of migrations, when the young take so hardly to traveling.” ~ Ivy Compton-Burnett
- “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” ~ Oscar Handlin
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“Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.” ~ Carl Sandburg
- “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” ~ Emma Lazarus
- “Discussing external migration issues is impossible without discussing internal migration issues” ~ Jack Goldstone
- “The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones. There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a ‘leveller’ on which the ‘fit’ survive and stragglers fall by the wayside. The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The ‘dictators’ of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the ‘gentlemen of the road’.” ~ Bruce Chatwin
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“We now know that climate change is a driver of migration, and is expected to increase the displacement of populations.” ~ Mary Robinson
- “Europe can only hold together and stand together, which is very important in times of migration challenges, terrorism challenges if each country takes responsibility for itself.” ~ Angela Merkel
- “The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.” ~ Salman Rushdie
- “Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans-liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal-the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history. Across the Pacific, across the Atlantic, they came from every point on the compass-many passing beneath the Statue of Liberty-with fear and vision, with sorrow and adventure, fleeing tyranny or terror, seeking haven, and all seeking hope…Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.” ~ George H. W. Bush
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“Either death is a state of nothingness and utter consciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.” ~ Plato
- “The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can’t imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it’s important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.” ~ Mohsin Hamid
- “I am a black person. I come out of an experience of exile and migration. I have always felt myself to be at once at home and away from home at the same time. It is inevitable that my perspective will be international.” ~ Kwame Dawes
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“I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- “As far as other people like in the migration, where they’re going, tens of thousands of people having cell phones with ISIS flags on them? I don’t think so. They’re not coming to this country. And if I’m president and if Obama has brought some to this country, they are leaving. They’re going. They’re gone.” ~ Donald Trump
- “California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.” ~ Christopher Isherwood
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“Why are we ignoring the rest of the world? We need to have a fair and global response to migration.” ~ Harsimrat Kaur Badal
- “And in some ways, to me, that’s one of the inspiring and powerful things about the Great Migration itself. There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, ‘On this date, people will leave the South.’ They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.” ~ Isabel Wilkerson
- “Dear friends, let us not forget the flesh of Christ which is in the flesh of refugees: their flesh is the flesh of Christ. It is also your task to direct all the institutions working in the area of forced migration to new forms of co-responsibility. This phenomenon is unfortunately constantly spreading. Hence your task is increasingly demanding in order to promote tangible responses of closeness, journeying with people, taking into account the different local backgrounds.” ~ Pope Francis
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“You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It’s what biologists call “selective migration.”” ~ Eric Weiner
- “Despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies-big business and big government-are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked. but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration, which in turn offers the only way to re-attain individual freedom of space-time and the small-group social structures which obviously best suit our nervous systems. It is another paradox of neuro-genetics that only in space habitats can humanity return to the village life and pastoral style for which we all long.” ~ Timothy Leary
- “Nearly all Americans have ancestors who braved the oceans – liberty-loving risk takers in search of an ideal – the largest voluntary migrations in recorded history… Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.” ~ George W. Bush
