Frans Timmermans Quotes

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe.

My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

In many ways I'm similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis has caused me to equate being Iranian with being alienated.

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

In German history, we don't have many reasons to be proud.

I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

Perhaps we Germans are a bit sensitive when it comes to walls and race.

My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

I am more South African than Pakistani now. It's a great country, and I have met so many nice people.

Like a lot of people, I read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' again and again and again when I was growing up - I'm still completely felled by what an astounding book it is. And as a teenager, I did a lot of reading about concentration camps and the vast horrors of the war.

You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.

Being an Indian in the U.S. and growing up in the suburbs were the two things that really shaped my outlook.

I've been inside the Anne Frank house. You've only read about Anne Frank in grade school. I've been in it. I've seen the diary. Things that teachers couldn't teach you.

I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.

I may be brown on the outside, but on the inside, I'm all American.

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.

Those years when Poland was occupied by the Nazis was one of the darkest time in Poland's history.

Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners.

My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.