Ethnic Heritage Quotes

My mom is Jamaican and Chinese, and my dad is Polish and African-American, so I had a pretty diverse culinary background to work with.

Pride in one's own race - and that does not imply contempt for other races - is ... a normal and healthy sentiment.

I realized that we have to do everything we can to preserve the Jewish race. I'm very proud of it, and I think it's wonderful.

My mother was a gypsy, and she had a lot of dark blood in her, and her hair was very, very thick - she couldn't even get a brush through it. So I have been very fortunate. And every time I go to cut it off, hairdressers refuse to do it.

[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

I don't diet. I'm Puerto Rican! You can never take my rice, pork, and beans away.

The fundamental, longtime American attitude has been to ask not where a person comes from but what are his personal qualities. On this basis men and women migrated from every quarter of the globe. By their hard work and their enormously varied talents they hewed a great nation out of a wilderness. By their dedication to liberty and equality they created a society reflecting man's most cherished ideas.

I am equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian fatherland.

My family is from Elmhurst, Queens, 54th Avenue, but I was born in Northern California.

My father is from the village of Beranci, Macedonia, and my mother is from Greece.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

My stepmother Angela is an Italian from New York City. I based Rhoda on her and a Jewish friend named Penny Ann Green. People often said that Rhoda seemed to be Italian. That was the Angela seeping through.

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.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.

Growing up in America, I never really appreciated my culture. I knew what being Hispanic was, but I thought that since I didn't look Hispanic, I was white.

Though I am not religious in the least, I am very proud to be Jewish.

I've been marching in every single ethnic nationality parade all throughout the City of New York. We're all Americans first and foremost, but people understand their heritage and it's good to see.

People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the whole culture and makes it richer and more interesting. I think if we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then we will be in a position where all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger.

I've been fascinated with Maori culture since I was a kid.

Why would I try to change who I look like, what my race is? No. No no no. You are beautiful because that’s the skin you were born with. Love it. And be proud of it.

My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.