Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
“It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen”
— Frank McCourt, book 'Tis
§14
'Tis (2000)
Source: ' Tis: a Memoir
Context: Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen.
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Frank McCourt38
Irish-American teacher and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer 1930–2009Related quotes
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Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
Karl Wolff (1900–1984) SS general
To Adolf Hitler. Quoted in "The Last 100 Days" - Page 173 - by John Toland - 1966