Wojciech Jaruzelski Quotes

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution.

The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.

Well, I am actually a daughter of the American Revolution

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family.

My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.

History has always fascinated me. Coming from a family that has it's own regal history, I always like places that have a rich past.

For two centuries, Poland suffered constant and brutal attacks. But while Poland could be invaded and occupied, and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you have lost your land but you never lost your pride.

Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.

My family have been around Northumberland for five generations.

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.'

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!

Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty .... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.

I have never felt like a second-class citizen. I consider myself a U.S. citizen. I appreciate and treasure my U.S. citizenship. I would never renounce or consider losing that citizenship. I want my children and their children to always have it.

Poland has not yet perished.

A Pole must accept everything Polish, both good and bad,..

The spirit of nationalism springs from the deepest of human emotions. It rises from the yearning of men to be free of foreign domination, to govern themselves. It springs from a thousand rills of race, of history, of sacrifice and pride in national achievement.

Nationhood is not founded on religion but blood ties, a common culture and homeland.

For those things which were done either by our fathers or ancestors, and in which we ourselves had no share, I can scarcely call our own.

My dad grew up really poor in Mississippi. I paid attention to that because I thought that's a healthier thing to pay attention to than, like, some statue of a great-great-great grandfather who has no connection to my life.

To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.

Poland is not East or West. Poland is at the center of European civilization. It has contributed mightily to that civilization. It is doing so today by being magnificently unreconciled to oppression.

Strangely enough, among my dad's things, I found the diary of an ancestor who was born in 1797 and became a ventriloquist in London. That was quite chilling. It described exactly how I was as a child but 150 years earlier - doing voices, pretending to be a ventriloquist.

I'm a fourth-generation New Yorker. My family has been in New York for many, many years.