Ethnic Origins Quotes

We are Macedonians but we are Slav Macedonians. That's who we are! We have no connection to Alexander the Greek and his Macedonia. The ancient Macedonians no longer exist, they had disappeared from history long time ago. Our ancestors came here in the 5th and 6th century (AD).

They [the Americans] are a mixture of British, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race called Americans have now arisen.

You can’t hate the roots of the tree without ending up hating the tree. You can’t hate your origin without ending up hating yourself. You can’t hate the land, your motherland, the place that you come from, and we can’t hate Africa without ending up hating ourselves. The Black man in the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central America, South America, and in the Caribbean—is the best example of how one can be made, skillfully, to hate himself that you can find anywhere on this earth.

We deny in the most positive language that this is an Anglo-Saxon nation. We deny that England is the mother country, and we deny that the great progress and achievements of this country have been brought about solely through the efforts and influence of the Puritans.... All Europe is our mother, not England.

All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

In European states all subjects have equal rights and under a single legislation, whatever their [religious or ethnic] origins… Without such a system, no justice is possible, because each party views its interests in a different way. With time, all the religious communities…become absorbed in pursuing their separate goals, and they regard as political tyranny any attempt to remove the distinctions between them. This runs counter to natural law, which ultimately governs over all.

Individual tribes or, in other words, races or stocks, are the constituent elements of the earliest history.

You may baptize as long as you want, but the Jew remains a Jew, the Chinese a Chinese and the Negro a Negro.

Casting me as King Arthur was quite bold of 'Spamalot's producers, although it has been historically proved Arthur was Asian, and that Sunday trading started with Asians in 11th-century Britain.

I'm part German and part Irish. In fact, there's even a town in Germany that was named after my family, Limbach or so forth. And I don't know. I might even have some Indian blood in there.

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.

At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races and religions, the womb of the world.

In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my 'ancient,' 'beautiful' origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.

The Kurds were in the Middle East long before the Arabs.

When Hegel later became a man of influence' he insisted that the Jews should be granted equal rights because civic rights belong to man because he is a man and not on account of his ethnic origins or his religion.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

I think that white people were, no question, the creators of what we call white America.

I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany.

We probably have, right now, after the Civil Rights movement - and this was very unfortunate - the most glaring time of giving up on Africa, saying we're Americans. We are Americans. I'm not arguing that point. So are the Italians. So are the Germans. So are the Jews. We're Americans with an historical geography of origins outside of the United States as all people, maybe except the indigenous Americans who came here so long ago, who have generations of people whose historical origins are right here but whose initial historical origins are somewhere in Asia.

I think we all are people that are the product of our backgrounds. It's wrong to think that you're not.

When you look at the science and the genetic studies that have been done on Palestinians and Jews, you find that there is a unity. They're both descended from the Canaanites. They're essentially the same people.

In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.