Irish In American Quotes

#1. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners ... California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart ... The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

John Steinbeck

#2. I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Alice Walker

#3. The White House was designed by Hoban, a noted Irish-American architect, and I have no doubt that he believed by incorporating several features of the Dublin style he would make it more homelike for any President of Irish descent. It was a long wait, but I appreciate his efforts.

John F. Kennedy

#4. I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.

Alice McDermott

#5. 'Lollipop Opera' is the backdrop to Finsbury Park. A place that is very thriving, interracial and lot of music stores, Greek, Turkish, all sorts of immigrant music. It's utter Englishness. It blends the Jamaicans, the Irish. It's like what Jim Reeves did with American country music.

John Lydon

#6. Whether serving in the military, building industry, organizing politically, or making their way in any other part of American culture, the Irish were determined to create a free and prosperous life for themselves. This Irish-American struggle led to social and political progress for all Americans.

Rashers Tierney

#7. I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.

Alice McDermott

#8. My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American.

Vivien Leigh

#9. Roughly 1 in 6 Americans have Irish blood. I'd say it's probably safe to assume that the average Irish-American who only comes out on St. Patrick's Day has no idea of the sort of economic powerhouse Ireland has become.

Scott McClellan

#10. It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

Kate Bush

#11. Germans found "American" (by which they often meant Irish) bars and their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy.

Donna R. Gabaccia

#12. You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.

Tracy Morgan

#13. Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.

Alice McDermott

#14. No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.

Brian Dennehy

#15. Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.

Lionel Sosa

#16. There's all sorts of soul. There's Irish soul and Native American soul. If it touches you and moves you, it's soul.

John Oates

#17. I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

Ishmael Reed

#18. I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.

John C. Reilly

#19. I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.

Allegra Huston

#20. I've got nothing against any individual American, except that there aren't any. They're always Irish-American, African-American ... There's never an American-American you can blame.

Simon Munnery

#21. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Chris Abani

#22. Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

Sherman Alexie

#23. 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

#24. American audiences are great. They get what I am doing, but as my band will tell you, nowhere tops the Irish audience. They are just brilliant. They are very open, but the Americans and Spanish come a close second.

Imelda May

#25. I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

John Cusack

#26. I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your classic American mutt.

Joe Lhota

#27. My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment.

Sarah Jones

#28. Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#29. I became an American citizen three years ago, and if I'd been arrested, maybe that wouldn't have happened. That was a very proud moment, by the way. I still have my Irish passport, but becoming an American citizen was important in terms of my family.

Jason O'Mara

#30. I'm so tired of the left trying to divide us by race. One of the things I said today in my speech, we're not Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, rich Americans, poor Americans. We're all Americans.

Bobby Jindal

#31. I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London ... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.

Graham Coxon

#32. I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.

Virginia Madsen

#33. I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I'm an American - you know, you grow.

George Carlin

#34. What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen.

J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur

#35. If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.

William Howard Taft

#36. I'm an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.

William Devane

#37. And then I want to come back here, light all these candles ... ' He kisses me again. ' ... and tell you a story about a lowly Irish peasant bartender who falls in love with a beautiful American princess.

K.A. Tucker

#38. I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish, Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.

Jojo

#39. When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

Hari Kondabolu

#40. My mum's parents were from Ireland, my dad's mum was American-Irish.

Dominic West

#41. I went to a Catholic University and there's something about being a Catholic-American. You know, St. Patrick's Day is, I'm Irish-Catholic. There's alcoholism in my family. It's like I've got to be Catholic, right?

Jim Gaffigan

#42. The Spanish and the American audiences are lunatics. They are very passionate and, like the Irish, they don't have as many inhibitions. If you are playing somewhere like Austria or Sweden, it takes them a little while to come out of themselves.

Imelda May

#43. Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I'm an Irish man.

Conor McGregor

#44. Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.

John McEnroe

#45. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

#46. Yancy is actually a Native-American name, but I'm Irish. Go figure.

Yancy Butler

#47. Michael: Barzini will set me up through somebody close ... that, supposedly, I won't suspect.
Hagen: Somebody like me.
Michael: You're Irish, they won't trust you.
Hagen: I'm German-American.
Michael: To them that's Irish.

Mario Puzo

#48. Hillary Clinton was actually inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame yesterday. Hillary said she's very proud of her Irish heritage or her Italian heritage or her Asian heritage. Whatever it takes to seal the deal with you guys. I've got to get into that Oval Office.

Jimmy Fallon

#49. I think the world's a little smaller these days. With the Internet and the availability of people, the pool of English speaking actors - not just American actors, but Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish. We're all up for grabs.

Sonya Walger

#50. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.

Rashers Tierney

#51. Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,
not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us
the Irish!

Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

#52. In the secular trinity of Irish-American values, loyalty and humor are father and son. Self-deprecation is the spirit that works in mysterious ways ...

Maureen Dezell

#53. 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

#54. Sometimes a man must stand for what is right and sometimes you must simply walk away and suffer the babblings of weak-minded fools or try to change their minds. It's like teachin' a pig to sing. It is a waste of your time and it annoys the pig.

John William Tuohy

#55. Most boys' first hero is their father. That was definitely true of my dad. He was a proud Irish American and he taught me a lot about ethics and responsibility. He also introduced me to a lot of wonderful folk music.

John C. Reilly

#56. It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years.

Josh Alan Friedman

#57. I'm very aware of my own background. I'm Irish, French, and then a little bit of everything else thrown in, ranging from German to Native American. We're talking about tiny drops of blood.

Anne Hathaway

#58. The Irish, who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro ... Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake.

Frederick Douglass