Barry Trotz Quotes

We [native-born] could not choose, but they [immigrants] could and did choose to be Americans.

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner. You must be eating some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.

I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

We quarrel with no man for being a foreigner, but we recognize the moral right in no class of American citizens to train up their children to be foreigners, and then to claim for them all the rights, franchises, and immunities of American citizens.

I was born in the U.S. This is my country.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

I spend more time in New York than the Dominican. I play here, I live here, so why not become a citizen?

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

My folks came to U.S. as immigrants, aliens, and became citizens. I was born in Boston, a citizen, went to Hollywood and became an alien.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

If you move to Canada, after a few years you call yourself Canadian. In Germany, it's difficult to belong.

I became an American citizen three years ago, and if I'd been arrested, maybe that wouldn't have happened. That was a very proud moment, by the way. I still have my Irish passport, but becoming an American citizen was important in terms of my family.

It takes more than just walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's what's in our souls.

I am still an Indonesian citizen.

I love my country. And I would have to renounce my Spanish citizenship to become a U.S. Citizen.

Those who do not want to participate in the spirit of America should not settle in America.

To become an American is a process which resembles a conversion. It is not so much a new country that one adopts as a new creed.

I was born in Australia and am proud of my Australian provenance, but I am now an American. Like so many naturalized citizens, I felt that I was an American before I formally became one.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

We have a lot of Brazilians in the United States. It doesn't mean we're traitors to our country.

Most of the discrimination I have encountered centered on the view that I am not a part of this great nation, even though I grew up in Ohio, graduated from law school in Washington, D.C., and received my commission in the U.S. Air Force in 1991.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.