Thomas Menino Quotes

My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.

My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World.

Millions upon millions of people came here full of hope and aspiration to this extraordinary land of liberty and opportunity, and helped build the United States. So the Atlantic Ocean was absolutely critical to the story of America.

Europeans have learned of the immense extent of our country and its limitless resources … They have also begun, or soon will begin, to learn of the Homestead law and provisions for securing to every man not only life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness but also the means of gaining an independent livelihood.

When my mother, sisters and I arrived on the shores of America when I was 8 years old, the boat on which we came, a freighter, passed the Statue of Liberty.

People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.

My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.

The great Pacific Railway is commenced... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years... This is the grandest enterprise under God!

Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores, and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world -- our new world.

Young man, there is America -- which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

America looked like the land of the future, separated by an ocean from the misfortunes, follies, and crimes of Europe.

My parents didn't feel that they had any choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. They did, however, choose to become Americans, and they lived American values every day.

Donald Trump's own mother Mary escaped the bone-crushing poverty of Scotland's remote Outer Hebrides for the promise of New York in 1929.

If America oppresses, why do so many people risk their lives coming here to be oppressed?

My own forefathers arrived in America in 1620 on the Mayflower.

My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.

I lived in America. I love America.

My parents were among the first families from their area to leave Nigeria and come to America, the land of the free.

If the Kennedys had been barred from entering America after fleeing Ireland during the famine, my grandfather never would have been president.

America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life -- a life that should be new in freedom.

I appreciate America as the land of opportunity. It's the land where you can see your dreams come true if you work hard. My parents are American.

The perseverance and the strength and the determination and the sacrifice that so many millions of people have had to endure to form this country is far greater than anything that we can really imagine.

I am proud to be an American and finally call this my home!

After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States - the greatest privilege on planet Earth.

For millions on the outside looking in, this is where they want to live - America.