Quotes About Ellis Island

#1. No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

Mitch Kapor

#2. I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Aleksandar Hemon

#3. My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.

James Gray

#4. El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America.

Beto O'Rourke

#5. I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

Bob Cousy

#6. He looked like someone with a steerage ticket on the titanic. Somebody who'd be standing in line at Ellis Island. Undiluted and old-blooded. Also cute.

Rainbow Rowell

#7. The thing I love about Vegas is that it's a melting pot. It's like working Ellis Island.

Don Rickles

#8. At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.

James Gray

#9. hailing from Sorrento, Italy, via Brooklyn via Ellis Island.

Bruce Springsteen

#10. The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.

Carol Moseley Braun

#11. I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!

Kerry Washington

#12. I am the byproduct of an Ellis Island orgy, basically. I'm everything. I've got quite a mixture in me. I know a lot of it and I don't know some of it. I'm pretty mixed up, but mostly Russian and Irish.

Gavin DeGraw

#13. Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

Arthur Hertzberg

#14. Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.

David Souter

#15. My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

James Gray

#16. Beginning with a trip out to Ellis Island, I saw for myself where thousands of European immigrants took their first steps onto American soil, bringing with them nothing but their ambition: people such as Erich von Stroheim and Adolph Zukor.

Paul Merton

#17. Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

William Styron

#18. No, I mean we'd all definitely involved in the music business someway or another, because we're all living with it, and in it, and also we've got all sorts of things we would like to do.

John Deacon

#19. I just love to act. I like to get away, totally play a different character, someone you can get really involved in knowing. I've gotten really involved in some characters and written down little summaries of where they live and what their families are like.

Amanda Peterson

#20. Devote today to something so daring even you can't believe you're doing it.

Oprah Winfrey

#21. I think America needs lots of tough people. Not just me. I think America needs to get tougher, all of us.

Chris Christie

#22. I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

Mary Ellen Mark

#23. My husband says I like animals more than I like people. I take that as the compliment he means it as.

Tricia Helfer