A Quote by H. Robert Horvitz

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.

H. Robert Horvitz

Quote Topics

Around Both Century Children Eastern Eastern Europe Europe First Generation Jews Left Parents Turn Were

Quote Author

H. Robert Horvitz
American - Scientist
Born: May 8, 1947

Within forty years of their arrival in the Plymouth colony, the first white settlers were afraid their children had lost the dedication and religious conviction of the founding generation. Ever since, Americans have looked to the next generation not only with love and solicitude but with a good measure of anxiety, worrying whether they themselves were good parents, fearful that their children would not turn out well.

Kenneth Keniston

My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans.

Susan Lucci

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

Madeleine Albright

From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.

Elliott Abrams

[17th-century] Puritans were the first modern parents. Like many of us, they looked on their treatment of children as a test of their own self-control. Their goal was not to simply to ensure the child's duty to the family, but to help him or her make personal, individual commitments. They were the first authors to state that children must obey God rather than parents, in case of a clear conflict.

C. Sommerville

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

Alison Gopnik

My generation those who were students in the late 60s was always, in the words of the Who, talking about our generation. That's what we thought of ourselves, as the most important thing since sliced bread. And the "we" that we meant was really the Western Europeans and American generation. And as I think back I suppose I have a sense of guilt on behalf of my generation, a sense that we were terribly provincial and didn't understand the really important stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe.

Tony Judt

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe - pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man.

Rich Cohen

We were the children of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the ’60s rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn’t imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.

Herbert Muschamp

I'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria.

Rick Famuyiwa

In Western Pennsylvania, our parents and grandparents left us a strong system of roads, rails, bridges, locks, dams, streetcars, and more - an investment that paid off throughout the twentieth century. It now falls to our generation to rebuild and improve upon this system for the twenty-first century.

Conor Lamb

You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews.

Benjamin Disraeli

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.

Alice McDermott

Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.

Ilan Stavans

In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends' parents who would shake their children's hands at bedtime.