Franck Ribery Quotes

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

It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker.

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.

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.

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

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

My son will be an American, but I remain French.

I figured if you live in a country long enough, you want to be a part of the political process, and you sort of owe it to your hosts. They've accepted you. Why wouldn't you accept them?

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.

It is important that those that do come to settle in the U.K. gain a sense of British identity and share British values. We have always attracted the best and brightest.

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

If you've lived in England for five years, for me, it doesn't make you English.

I'm still a proud Irishman, of course, but I've become an American citizen. I'm very, very proud of that.

Stay with us, please remain in this country and constitute a nation based on national unity.

You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.

The film 'Documented,' a project of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Define American campaign, is about my families: the family I was blessed to be born into, and the family of friends, mentors and allies that I found when I moved to the United States at 12, a Filipino kid trying to make sense of my new home in America.

We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We've got to deal with this reality. We've got to extend the franchise.

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

By virtue of my traditions, and my community, I worked hard to ensure that I was accepted as part of the traditional family of America.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

I am not an African. I am an American.