Ted Cruz Quotes

I grew up learning firsthand what it was like to flee communism and oppression.

I feel lucky. I grew up in an open-minded, multi-cultural community in West Vancouver in Canada. There were people who had escaped some kind of oppression. Some of them were first-generation immigrants, others were one or two generations back.

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

I escaped from my home country, Bulgaria, to Czechoslovakia and then to the West.

For a round hundred years it was a national ideal that the United States should be the asylum for the poor and the oppressed of every land. This very early came to be known as the "traditional" American attitude towards immigration.

Foreigners being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters can find asylum here [Cuba]. It does not matter if they speak English and were born in the United States.

We cannot forget that we are a nation founded by refugees who were fleeing oppression and often fearful for their lives.

My mother made the courageous decision to flee a tyrannized Cuba in the 1950s and bring her children to the United States, where I was born.

My parents fled from a Cuban dictatorship in search of freedom. Growing up, I saw my parents struggle... I am here today because of them. My success is their success. Their sacrifice and perseverance made my education possible.

I had immigrant grandparents who came to this country and came for religious freedom and loved it, never made any money, Bronx, Brooklyn, but loved America. And they told me every day it's the greatest country in the world.

My grandfather, in 1848, had fled from Germany to find political freedom in the United States.

I'm a first-generation American, so I had friends from several cultures while growing up, including Indian and Iranian friends.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn't have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I'm a pure American - even more than people who are born here - because I did it by choice as an adult.

As freedom-loving people across the globe hope for an end to tyranny, we will never forget the enormous suffering of the Holocaust.

I will keep my word. My father fled Cuba, and I will fight to defend liberty because my family knows what it's like to lose it.

In grade school I was taught that the United States is a melting pot. People from all over the world come here for freedom and to pursue a better life. They arrive with next to nothing, work incredibly hard, learn a new language and new customs, and in a generation they become an integral part of our amazing nation.

Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'

Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

When you see a Sudanese walking on the street, there is a story.

Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.

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.

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

The Asylum they open to the oppressed of all nations should console the earth. The case with which the injured may escape from oppressive governments, will compel Princes to become just and cautious; and the rest of the world will gradually open their eyes upon the empty illusions with which they have been hitherto cheated by politicians. But for this purpose America must preserve herself from these illusions; and take care to avoid being what your ministerial writers are frequently saying She will be — an image of our Europe — a mass of divided powers contending for territory and commerce, and continually cementing the slavery of the people with their own blood.

A refuge for the oppressed from every land and clime.