Malcolm X Quotes

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

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

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 adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

I became a citizen after 9/11.

I am proud to be an American Citizen.

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.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

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

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 am not an African. I am an American.

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.

We are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

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

Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules.

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.

One of these days every person in Canada will be a Canadian.

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.

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

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.

French citizenship should be either inherited or merited.

Anyone who's gotten their passport in America will tell you, when you get it, it still says what country you were born in. So I remember getting my American passport. I was like, 'Woo-hoo! I'm going to travel.' And I opened it up. It said, 'Born in Iran.' I'm like, 'Oh, come on, man!'

People say to me all the time, 'When did you know that you had fully become an American?' And I say, 'The day I realized I loved peanut butter.'