#Nationality Quotes

“More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.”

“We (The British) have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

“There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.”

“But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.”

“He who seeks truth should be of no country.”

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

“The merchant has no country .”

“A Frenchman may possibly be clean; an Englishman is conscientiously clean.”

“I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. But he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.”

“It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk.”

“I am writing Parsifal only for my wife - if I had to depend on the German spirit, I should have nothing more to say.”

“Though German art can never be Bavarian, but simply German, yet Munich is the capital of this German Art; here, under shelter of a Prince who kindles my enthusiasm, to feel myself a native and member of the people was, to me, the homeless wanderer, a deep, a genuine need.”

“The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.”

“By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.”

“Basically the French are all peasants.”

“They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.”

“I am not an American. I am the American.”

“Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.”

“The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole - besides being an homme d'action [man of action] - that I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the struggle of nationalities and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality.... His aim now is to raise a German legion in London.”

“One criticizes the English for carrying their teapots wherever they go, even lugging them up Mount Etna. But doesn't every nationhave its teapot, in which, even when traveling, it brews the dried bundles of herbs brought from home?”

“If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything.”

“Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.”

“Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.”

“I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.”

“The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

“No Englishman is ever fairly beaten”

“The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.”

“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”

“The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.”

“A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”

“We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.”

“I read in a newspaper that I was to be received with all the honors customarily rendered to a foreign ruler. I am grateful for the honors; but something within me rebelled at that word 'foreign'. I say this because when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a 'foreigner'. He is just an 'American'. And, in the same way, in the United States, Canadians are not 'foreigners', they are 'Canadians'. That simple little distinction illustrates to me better than anything else the relationship between our two countries.”

“I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.”

“I'm half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess!”