First Generation American Quotes

#1. My mother is Greek and my father is Bulgarian. I am a first-generation American and native Los Angeleno. I was born and raised in Hollywood.

Rita Wilson

#2. I'm a first-generation American, so I had friends from several cultures while growing up, including Indian and Iranian friends.

Michael Steger

#3. My mother is a first generation American. Her father worked in the Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton, New Jersey.And yet my mother became the first person in her family to get a college degree.

Samuel Alito

#4. I'm a first generation American. My mother is Italian and Russian and a lot of other things, and my father is Uruguayan. In fact, my mother's been married twice, and both men were Uruguayan. So I grew up in a very European/Latin American-influenced home.

Sebastian Arcelus

#5. I'm black and Cuban, Australian and Irish, and like most people in America, I'm someone whose roots come from somewhere else. I'm a mixed race, first-generation American.

Soledad O'Brien

#6. We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

Paul Ryan

#7. I was part of punk's second generation, so, not the first wave of '70s punk, but the American hardcore scene. I had a really strong love for music prior to that, but punk created a new template.

Bucky Pope

#8. I'm Korean-American. Not Colombian. My parents are first-generation, and I'm like ... in-between, because I moved over here when I was four or five.

Steven Yeun

#9. The twenty-first-century successful black woman is brilliant and tenacious and not afraid to flex her intellectual, spiritual, or financial muscles. She has accomplished, earned, and owned more than black women of any other generation in American history.

Sophia Nelson

#10. My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

Antonya Nelson

#11. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

Hunter S. Thompson

#12. Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.

Max Von Sydow

#13. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.

Stephen Burt

#14. As a first generation Jewish American, I have witnessed firsthand Jewish immigrants who have come to this Nation in order to create a better life for themselves, their families, and future generations.

Jan Schakowsky

#15. I think we're the first generation to successfully integrate American society.

Ted Rall