Quotes About American Identity

#1. It [9/11 tragedy] has affected us on so many levels: economically, morally, spiritually, ethically. It's been all over the place. A new American identity emerged - we now live in a very different America. This is the power of the definitive event.

Porochista Khakpour

#2. Guns are part of the American identity.

Henry Rollins

#3. My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.

Mark McMorris

#4. American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.

Ben Dreyfuss

#5. Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity

Deborah Tall

#6. 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

#7. The American 'unum' has been lost since the Sixties. If this continues, there will soon be no unifying American identity and vision to balance the 'pluribus,' and the days of the Republic will be numbered.

Os Guinness

#8. The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

Samuel P. Huntington

#9. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#10. Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

Aberjhani

#11. Could it be that violence is as much a part of the American identity as the Constitution, and a vital component to its economic stability?

Henry Rollins

#12. And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we've come from and where we are and where we're headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.

Matt Damon

#13. American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

Leon Wieseltier

#14. My national identity is first American. My religious identity is first Muslim.

Dalia Mogahed

#15. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.

Wynton Marsalis

#16. Being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.

Raquel Cepeda

#17. Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

Raquel Cepeda

#18. With increasing skill, the ads glorify her "role" as an American housewife-knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.

Betty Friedan

#19. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein

Michael Pollan

#20. No. But then the American Government
whatever branch
has never really grasped the concept of tribal identity.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#21. When I first arrived in Houston, I was fascinated with the elaborate styles of cowboy boots and thought they were incredibly exotic. They also seemed to be a central part of a specifically 'Texan' identity, one distinct from being 'American.'

Shahzia Sikander

#22. the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception

American Psychiatric Association

#23. I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of your identity. Otherwise, you know, there would be no American Jews. Even if you're not strictly, fiercely Orthodox, you commit yourselves to a community of memory.

Simon Schama

#24. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. Then white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow.

Eddie Huang

#25. I choose to be American, I choose to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I choose to have Puerto Rican/Jewish neighbors, and I choose to maintain my Chinese identity.

Eddie Huang

#26. Most people are surprised to hear how they really sound, as the American media uses the call of the red-tailed hawk when showing an eagle. They don't think the eagle sounds regal enough. And so we lie to ourselves about the very identity of our national icon ...

Brandon Sanderson

#27. To reaffirm the statement on the choosing of my identity, I come from two beautiful cultures which I have embraced, bridged, balanced, and identify with. I am proud to be who I am as a Dine' (Navajo) and Nahilii (African American) woman. Hozho', , & blessings

Radmilla Cody

#28. Who is as free as a writer? Nadie es tan libre como un escritor . . . No one is as free as a writer!

Sofia Espinoza Alvarez

#29. [H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

A.S. Byatt

#30. In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.

Ron Suskind

#31. I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

NoViolet Bulawayo

#32. I wish every American explored the importance of novel writing, identity, honesty, character and place in fresh-ass ways.

Kiese Laymon

#33. I don't think that there is one "authentic" element of American style to identity - it's about a sense of freedom, individuality, and embracing personal style. Fashion also has a bit of mystery, which is part of the allure, and yet anyone can partake.

Thakoon Panichgul

#34. American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Tom Hooper

#35. We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution.

Samuel P. Huntington

#36. The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.

Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

#37. Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.

American Psychiatric Association

#38. The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism.

Donald Wuerl

#39. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#40. Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

Peter Thiel

#41. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

Rachael Price

#42. You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#43. American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Noam Chomsky

#44. One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#45. Fortune cookies are an American invention, and we gave it to them. The Chinese were probably like, "Uh, we don't want it." And we were like, "It's now part of your ethnic identity.

Jim Gaffigan

#46. Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.

Teju Cole

#47. I look white to a lot of people. And I'm not. I'm African-American. I'm mixed. I like to call myself Mulatto because that definition fits. So, you know, I've dealt with the conflict my whole life between how I look and my actual ethnic and racial identity.

Mat Johnson

#48. If America is to be strong in the future, Americans must see America as home, not divided by race or region. Build American jobs for the future and come together with compassion to solve problems.

Phil Mitchell

#49. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#50. Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#51. I was confident about America and the idea that in America people can become American without masking their ethnic identity.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#52. Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

Etgar Keret

#53. And we should be a welcoming nation. Our identity is not based on race or ethnicity, it's based on a set of shared values. That's American citizenship.

Jeb Bush

#54. Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson's memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity.

Chris Hedges

#55. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

Raquel Cepeda

#56. I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.

Doug Liman

#57. We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

Spike Lee

#58. Being Christian doesn't mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord.

Marcus J. Borg

#59. Don't you ever just think of yourself as American?

Sabrina Vourvoulias

#60. I've realized that it's important to stop trying to think I'm any one thing. People are confused as to their identity and try to cling to one aspect of that identity to describe what they are: American, Republican, Muslim. These are really incomplete.

Mohsin Hamid

#61. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

S.I. Hayakawa

#62. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

Clement Alexander Price