Irish Americans Quotes

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. ~ Ami Bera

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story. ~ Amy Chua

Explaining the Jews in a Catholic school when you're Irish is like having to explain your country's foreign policy while on a vacation in France. You don't know what you're talking about and no matter what you say, they're not going to like it anyway. ~ John William Tuohy

The sports page told me that the New Jersey Niggers had beaten the Boston Micks. Some player on the Houston Hebes had accused the San Antonio Spics of dropping their last game to get a higher draft pick. The league was expanding to Toronto, and since they had already honored African Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Hispanic Americans, they wanted to name a team to honor Native Americans. They ~ MariJo Moore

Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Soviets were worried that the Americans would attack their "sparkling new Mir space station, ... in a space shuttle, throw out grappling hooks, forcibly board the peaceful habitat and claim it as captured territory. To the hard-core Soviet mind-set, the American government was an unstable combination of cowboys and gangsters, unpredictable and capable of any insane action. The cosmonauts would have to be armed against outrageous aggression. ~ James Mahaffey

And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home. ~ Rachel Cusk

We British say "to put the world to rights." I've discovered that that's not the way Americans say it and people scratch their heads and say, "Funny ... what does he mean by that?" It means to fix the thing, to make it all better again. ~ N. T. Wright

The Marshall Plan had stopped the Communists, had brought the European nations back from destruction and decay, had performed an economic miracle; and there was, given the can-do nature of Americans, a tendency on their part to take perhaps more credit than might be proper for the actual operation of the Marshall Plan, a belief that they had done it and controlled it, rather than an admission that it had been the proper prescription for an economically weakened Europe and that it was the Europeans themselves who had worked the wonders. ~ David Halberstam

We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past. ~ Eric Weiner

Sometimes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as a hunting expeditions ("As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away"; "Terror hunt snares twenty-five"; and "Net closes around Bin Laden") with enemy bases as animal nests ("Pakistanis give up on lair of Osama"; "Terror nest in Fallujah is attacked") from which the prey must be driven out ("Why Bin Laden is so difficult to smoke out"; "America's new dilemma: how to smoke Bin Laden out from caves"). We need to trap the animal ("Trap may net Taliban chief"; "FBI terror sting nets mosque leaders") and lock it in a cage ("Even locked in a cage, Saddam poses serious danger"). Sometimes the enemy is a ravening predator ("Chained beast - shackled Saddam dragged to court"), or a monster ("The terrorism monster"; "Of monsters and Muslims"), while at other times he is a pesky rodent ("Americans cleared out rat's nest in Afghanistan"; "Hussein's rat hole"), a venomous snake ("The viper awaits"; "Former Arab power is 'poisonous snake'"), an insect ("Iraqi forces find 'hornet's nest' in Fallujah"; "Operation desert pest"; "Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark"), or even a disease organism ("Al Qaeda mutating like a virus"; "Only Muslim leaders can remove spreading cancer of Islamic terrorism"). In any case, they reproduce at an alarming rate ("Iraq breeding suicide killers"; "Continent a breeding ground for radical Islam"). ~ David Livingstone Smith

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance. ~ Timothy Egan

But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands. ~ Theodore H. White

When you look at it objectively, that's what most colonists do - they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there's no one to point fingers at you. It's just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can't do shit. ~ Alex Latimer

As president, he immediately invited the gay activists who helped elect him to "LGBT" receptions at the White House, where he assured them that crusty Americans could one day be cajoled out of their "worn arguments and old attitudes." "Welcome to your White House," he burbled, promising to support every item on the LGBT agenda: "We've been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration." They do. Should Obama win a second term, the justices he appoints will almost certainly unveil a bogus new constitutional right to gay marriage, discovered within the "penumbras" of Lawrence v. Texas. At which point Obama, drawing upon the faux-pained honesty he has perfected, can regurgitate what he wrote in his memoirs: that he was once on "the wrong side of history" but has now happily come into the light. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. ~ Herbert Croly

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations. ~ Steve Erickson

Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else. ~ Neil Nakadate

Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one ... This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness. ~ Rachel Johnson

I like the idea of bringing cartoon characters to life ... and although the Americans have already attempted this, their culture is not sufficiently humane to make it work. ~ Gerard Depardieu

We can no longer oversimplify. We can no longer build lazy and false stereotypes: Americans are like this, Russians are like that, a Jew behaves in such a way, a Negro thinks in a different way. The lazy generalities - 'You know how women are ... Isn't that just like a man?' The world cannot be understood from a single point of view. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Baseball has long been a national pastime that many Americans have cherished. ~ Jim Sensenbrenner

Out of the east on an Irish stallion came bounty hunter Dan His heart quickened and burdened by the need to get his man He found Pete peacefully fishing by the river, pulled his gun and got the drop He said, Pete, you think you've changed, but you have not. ~ Bruce Springsteen

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving. ~ Dave Eggers

Americans are hungry for change both at home and in our relations with the rest of the world. ~ Susan Rice

This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland? ~ Erskine Childers

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In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today. ~ Howard Zinn

I'm surprised you haven't come to hate humans," Rose said with hesitation. "I mean, given all that happened to you here. I'm pretty sure assimilating wasn't easy either. You have a sort of foreign look for an American, and Americans are notorious for their xenophobia."

Zita laughed softly. "Me? Hate humans?" She darkly shook her head. "I fought in the Midnight War for thirty years, Rosie. I know what happens when people let hate make decisions for them. ~ Ash Gray

Many cases of twentieth-century American map geekdom, it seems, began the same way that many twentieth-century Americans began: conceived in the backseats of Buicks ~ Ken Jennings

Father did not allow himself to be involved with the young generation - our, as he called, hair-brained inventions. He preferred to keep himself isolated and did not, particularly, like Americans. But you were different - in you, father often said, 'he found an admirable soul'. ~ B. R. Stateman

My own ongoing research among secular Americans-as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture-confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts. ~ Phil Zuckerman

You have won the Cold War ... [Your] underappreciated valor [helped] topple the Berlin Wall, and bring down dictators the world over ... For the past four decades the world behind the Iron Curtain ... looked to Americans for hope, and America looked to you to get the job done. Today, the free world says thank you. ~ Bob Dole

This change often presents a major challenge because the person may experience loneliness and the type of marginalization that people of color have constantly experienced. For many White Americans, the challenge and isolation may be too much, and they will return to their old ways allowing denial and self-deception to reestablish themselves. ~ Derald Wing Sue

Although white sociologists would have all Americans believe that the black female is often the "man of the house," this is rarely the case. Even in single-parent homes, black mothers may go so far as to delegate the responsibility of being the "man" to male children. In some single-parent homes where no male is present, it is acceptable for a visiting male friend or lover to assume a decision-making role. Few black women, even in homes where no men are present, see themselves as adopting a "male" role. ~ Bell Hooks

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one. ~ Fareed Zakaria

The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional. ~ Bella DePaulo

Townsend's wife Rita, a striking, razor-sharp Latina lawyer, who seemed to be the brains in the household, lost her cool in front of the cameras at a rally in Charleston and called C2C a concha de tu madre before she could be hustled off the stage. Her press officer translated the phrase as "the seashell your mother likes," but the several million South Americans in the U.S. knew it to have a slightly different connotation. ~ Doug Magee

Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt. ~ Jim Trelease

When even one American - who has done nothing wrong - is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - then all Americans are in peril. ~ Harry S. Truman

British!Deadpool: "No, it's no good. I can feel that an American's having a major battle. For some bizarre reason I feel utterly compelled to get involved. ~ Rob Williams