Italian American Quotes

The Mob loved Sinatra not just because he was Italian-American, but because he had crossed over into a nether world in which they could never belong. And he got there because he could do something few people in the world could do as well, and no one in the same way: he could sing. ~ Nancy Jo Sales

a Sicilian grandma is a formidable opponent ~ Traci Andrighetti

Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy. ~ Stanley Tucci

[T]he hyphenation question is, and always has been and will be, different for English immigrants. One can be an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and so forth. (Jews for some reason prefer the words the other way around, as in 'American Jewish Congress' or 'American Jewish Committee.') And any of those groups can and does have a 'national day' parade on Fifth Avenue in New York. But there is no such thing as an 'English-American' let alone a 'British-American,' and one can only boggle at the idea of what, if we did exist, our national day parade on Fifth Avenue might look like. One can, though, be an Englishman in America. There is a culture, even a literature, possibly a language, and certainly a diplomatic and military relationship, that can accurately be termed 'Anglo-American.' But something in the very landscape and mapping of America, with seven eastern seaboard states named for English monarchs or aristocrats and countless hamlets and cities replicated from counties and shires across the Atlantic, that makes hyphenation redundant. Hyphenation - if one may be blunt - is for latecomers. ~ Christopher Hitchens

he normally had his pastry shipped from Boston's north end ~ Leighann Dobbs

My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house. ~ Martin Scorsese

I learned when I was a student in Connecticut. I had an Italian-American teacher who gave me classes for a week, and then said, "Okay, you're ready." And I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to drive!. But he knew the policeman who gave the test. And that's how I got through. ~ Sandra Cisneros

I was gearing up for it. I took some singing lessons. And I opened my mouth, and Atom promptly said, 'That's not going to happen. We love your voice, but maybe we could use some of your English wit.' He had doubts about it from way back. For starters, we weren't going to be doing the Italian-American crooning thing. ~ Colin Firth

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me. ~ Martin Scorsese

My husband is actually Italian-American, and he thought I was Italian when he first met me. ~ Andrea Navedo

Three Italians sitting around a kitchen table without food or drink is a sure sign of trouble. ~ A.A. Freda

I've played some gangster roles, but that's obviously not me. When you're an Italian-American New York actor, it's just an easy way to get cast. ~ Michael Imperioli

As an Italian-American, I have a special responsibility to be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes. ~ Al D'Amato

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French. ~ Lorraine Bracco

I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on. ~ Martin Scorsese

If Nonna sensed weakness, she'd zero in for the kill ~ Rosie Genova

I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually. ~ Martin Scorsese

I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them. ~ Tony Bennett

We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters. ~ Martin Scorsese

I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver. ~ Chazz Palminteri

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people. ~ Bill Ayers

At almost every challenge, the bastions of tradition run up a white flag. It's almost as if they've been neutralized, neutered even, as though there were nothing left on the inside. Could it be the emptiness, reluctance to stand on and defend the tradition and its institutions, a shaky hold on principle, a failure to draw conclusions and make judgments, are the real legacy of the 'American Century'? If so, who really won all of those wars? ~ Diana West

The most effective weapon against crime is cooperation ... The efforts of all law enforcement agencies with the support and understanding of the American people. ~ J. Edgar Hoover

I want to make sure that the American worker has an opportunity to see their wages rise and their incomes increase. ~ Rick Santorum

I love being Italian. ~ Connie Stevens

The Mediterranean will be turned into an Italian lake. ~ Benito Mussolini

I speak Italian, French, Creole and English. ~ Meta Golding

In general, advertising isn't a "creative" atmosphere. It's a business atmosphere and your job is puzzle solving. My favorite aspect of the business, I guess, was presenting to clients. What I enjoyed least were the clients. Worried corporate brand managers, trying to dumb-down their ads for the stupid American population. I hated the disrespect that these people had for "consumers." ~ Augusten Burroughs

According to the American Lung Association, the average smoker dies seven years earlier than the average nonsmoker, which means that smokers pay into Social Security and private pension funds for all of their working lives but then don't stick around very long to collect the benefits. ~ Charles Wheelan

We have to remember examples of many artists of conscious rap who have been coopted by the Department of State of the United States to be cultural ambassadors in different parts of the world, like Syria, like other parts of the Middle East, including conscious Islamic-American rappers that are representing an international political agenda for the United States through cultures more affable for people of color in other parts of the world. ~ Bocafloja

I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us. ~ Serena Williams

I'm Kan, the Louis Vouitton don / Bought my mom purse, now she Louis Vuitton mom / I didn't play the hand I was dealt I changed my cards / I prayed to the skies and I changed my stars / I went to the malls and I balled too hard / Oh My God is that a Black card / I turned around and replied why yes, but I prefer the term African American Express ~ Kanye West

In the case of the Democrats' 2009 budget request, the statement of need could not have been articulated any clearer: We need more spending, historic new tax hikes, and greater control over the way American families live their lives. ~ Roy Blunt

Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to). ~ George Bernard Shaw

I was the all-American face. You name it, honey - American Dairy Milk, Metropolitan Life insurance, McDonald's, Burger King. The Face That Didn't Matter - that's what I called my face. ~ Debra Winger

Asia is the continent rhythm forgot. At best Asian music is off-brand American pop, like Sonny Bono in a karaoke bar. At worst Asian music sounds as if a truck full of wind chimes collided
with a stack of empty oil drums during a birdcall contest. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Those officers and men who were immediately under my observation, evinced the greatest gallantry, and I have no doubt that all others conducted themselves as became American officers and seamen. ~ Oliver Hazard Perry

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind. ~ Daniel Webster

There's no question that there's been a breach in the trust between urban - especially urban community, African-American and minority communities and the police in major American cities. ~ Mark Shields

The BAFTAs give the British point of view, and the Oscars give the American point of view, but the truth is we're all working in an international industry. ~ Ian McKellen

Well, it's possible that the new infusion of ad money against Donald Trump kept his margins in Kentucky and Louisiana down a bit. But we're also seeing something that we've never seen in 100 years, which is we are seeing the crackup of a major American political party. ~ Mara Liasson

Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I'm an American searching for some sort of parameters, a way of life - I'm looking for a slight formality, for a place where you can never be overdressed. ~ Waris Ahluwalia

To most Europeans, I guess, America now looks like the most dangerous country in the world. Since America is unquestionably the most powerful country, the transformation of America's image within the last thirty years is very frightening for Europeans. It is probably still more frightening for the great majority of the human race who are neither Europeans nor North Americans, but are Latin Americans, Asians and Africans. They, I imagine, feel even more insecure than we feel. They feel that, at any moment, America may intervene in their internal affairs with the same appalling consequences as have followed from American intervention in Southeast Asia. ~ L. Fletcher Prouty

The American dream was not supposed to look like this, and when men went off the war, too often other men came in the night to the bedroom at the back of the long, narrow trailers. In fact, I had lived there and had gone off to war, and someone took of my place in the bed and took of my young wife. But that was few wars ago, and so much has happened since , that the only lingering bitterness left is that the bastard also took my dog. ~ Nelson DeMille

Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/Left perspective. ~ Dennis Prager

I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps. ~ Newt Gingrich

I am extremely grateful for my 'American Idol' experience, and I enjoyed every bit of it. ~ Rayvon Owen

She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long. ~ Clyde Brion Davis

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Wanted has gone into second, third and fourth printings of the individual issues and the north American printings of Wanted #1 are now close to 100,000. ~ Mark Millar

There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People rebelled and poured into Tahrir Square, shouting slogans against the government just like they did earlier this year. Sadat learned his lesson and kept bread subsidies in place, and so did a host of other Middle Eastern dictators - many of whom were propped up for years by the West, partly through subsidized American wheat. ~ Annia Ciezadlo

This is the America that I love. This is a great people. We can do anything. We can achieve anything. We've got a government that has gotten in the way of the American people. We're going to change that in November. ~ Mitt Romney

But I also want to change the dynamics of this debate, which has kept us gridlocked into positions which caused people to shoot at abortion clinics and other Americans to view it as the only issue in American politics, ... There are areas we can agree on ... We need to work together to eliminate abortion. ~ John McCain