An American Family Quotes

“So what if you are thirsty? Always be a river for everyone.”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

“No man is complete until his education is complete.”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family

“For the poor man, the immigrant, the homeless veteran living under a bridge, to be treated under the law the same as the rich man, the scion, the connected political appointee is the greatest privilege of being a United States citizen. It is what all people, everywhere, aspire to: the fundamental dignity of equality. When you live somewhere it doesn’t exist, it is all you yearn for.”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

“When the boys were little, I used to take them to the gleaming white Jefferson Memorial at the edge of the Tidal Basin. Under the dome, we would read the inscriptions carved into the walls—the paragraph of self-evident truths from the Declaration of Independence, the four sentences from a religious freedom bill Jefferson drafted in 1777, the excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1816 (“Institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”).”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

“The proctor still held the note, and he turned it so I could read it. Imtiaz had written it on his official stationery, with his name and title embossed at the top. “Please allow this student to sit for the exam,” it said. “It is my personal guarantee that his fees will be paid.” He’d signed it with his full name and printed his title below, as if to make certain no one would imagine I’d forged the note. I felt a hitch in my throat and a flush in my cheeks, a spasm of gratitude for such an act of faith and kindness. Imtiaz barely knew me, if he recognized me at all. He owed me nothing. Yet he had staked his reputation, and a sum of money, on me, merely because I had a need for which he was able to provide. I’d always been taught that people are fundamentally decent, and that each individual should be treated with as much dignity as I can muster. But to see it play out, to be the direct recipient of such kindness? To read Imtiaz’s words? Perhaps it seemed a minor gesture to him, a moment of jotting a few lines on a paper, nothing more. But the consequences for me were, literally, life-changing.”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice

“Rights were not unalienable. There were only tenuous privileges granted by capricious powers,”
― Khizr Khan, An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice