Hyphenated American Quotes & Sayings

I push back against a deeply-entrenched tendency in American culture to label quickly and no longer even examine the labels that were initially stamped on a person. I don't have a problem with any of my "hyphenated" biography - I don't have any problem with that at all. The world would be a better place if our thread of hyphenation were truly embraced beyond mere naming and category. — Fady Joudah

Luna was remote and ladylike. The only time anyone had ever seen Luna angry was when someone referred to her as 'African-American'.
"I'm an American," she had snapped, whirling on the offender. "I've never even been to Africa. I was born in California, my father was a major in the Marine Corps, and I'm not a hyphenated anything. I have a black heritage, but I also have a white one." She had held out one slim arm and studied the color of it. "Looks to me like I'm brown. We're all just different shades of brown,so don't try to set me apart. — Linda Howard

Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution. — Jeffrey Rosen

The hyphenated American is ridiculous. But that's what we have to put up with. I think that any person that's in the United States is better off here than they would be where they came from. — John Wayne

Today there are a lot places where people say they're just hopeless. If I can come from a hopeless country, get an education, become a hyphenated American and become president of the World Bank, it's my moral duty to make sure that every single person on the planet has that opportunity. — Jim Yong Kim

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American. — Russell Means

I am tired with hyphenated Americans! We are not Indian-Americans, or African-Americans. — Bobby Jindal

You don't have freedom because you are a hyphenated American; you have freedom because you are an individual, and that should be protected. — Ron Paul

The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American — Theodore Roosevelt

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds ... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that. — Paul Auster