Woodrow Wilson Quotes

Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

Some call me a Cuban hyphen American. I reject that. I don't believe in hyphenated Americans.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

I'm tired of hyphenated Americans.

The unifying characteristics that make us Americans are becoming more and more diluted now because new immigrants want to set up ethnic enclaves to retain their culture and language.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen

The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that's what we have to put up with. I think that any person that's in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from.

The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American

America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.

Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

Traditionally, the ideology of the United States nationhood perpetuated the myth that immigrants would shed their particularistic ethnic identities and loyalties. Eventually these “strangers” would be assimilated into a homogeneous body politic that was based on the equality of individual rights.

It is often not even wise to try to make an American of the best of aliens.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

I am Chinese, but I am thoroughly American.

America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

Sometimes I struggle with being American.

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

People came to America and they did not abandon their own cultures, but they assumed new ones, a new one, an American culture rooted in liberty and freedom that they had never enjoyed in their lives prior. They didn't have to sacrifice who they were. They didn't have to change or give it up, but they were eager to become Americans.