Quotes About Nationality

The problem with being Irish... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.

Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.

We should be very concerned: if identity theft is so simple to do, what's to stop me from entering this country and assuming the identity of someone else for the sole purpose of living here illegally for terrorist reasons? That alone would be a concern.

Well, consider this Custer's payback." "Since my grandfather killed him," said Archille, "there is a certain justice to the idea. Still, Thomas here is a bona fide American citizen. I'm Canadian. My brother fought in the trenches. My uncle was at the Somme.

James liked to joke that if America ever invaded Canada, Canadians would probably apologize for being in their way.

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.

She says she is Irish—Nell O'Connor, but she was born in Latvia and talks like a Greek.

For most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country.

Peru has had a Japanese president (Alberto Fujimori). Britain had a Jewish prime minister, all of whose grandparents were born in Italy (Benjamin Disraeli). No one calls these countries "nations of immigrants." America has never had a president who wasn't, at least in part, of British ancestry, but people still babble that we're a nation of immigrants.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!

I would no more renounce my Country than my Religion: I would leave posterity free; but would not deprive them of an attachment that I value myself upon: Nor yet my country, of a family that never gave it cause to be ashamed of it.

He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.

As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.

more Irish than French).

Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French.

Només vaig escriure poemes d'amor quan estimava. Com hauria pogut escriure cançons d'odi, sense odi? [...] Com hauria pogut jo, per a qui només tenen importància la cultura i la barbàrie, odiar una nació [la francesa] que figura entre les més cultes del món, i a la qual devia una part tan gran de la meva formació?

I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an AMERICAN criminal lunatic!

So you're British?' said Billy. 'I think of myself as English first, British second. It's a way of keeping the Scots and Welsh at a distance, never mind the Irish.

Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one's view of them.

Inside me I'm Ghanaian, and I'm proud to be African. But of course I'm Italian. I was born in Italy. I've never been to Africa in my life, but I will go one day.

I always feel very connected to Canada. My reference for everything is my Canadian background, my life in Canada. Particularly on this issue of refugee immigration: I couldn't be prouder of Canada.

I grew up my whole life in Ireland and obviously sound very, very Irish. I feel like it's just one of those things that just charms the socks off of people.

I sort of lived half my life in California, half in England, so I am, I suppose, a little bit American.

I have lived and worked in Britain all my life. Not even in the dark days of penal Labour taxation in the Seventies did I have any intention of leaving the country of my birth.