America Quotes
America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men s cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.America
Abish, Walter
Author
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it s a bore.
America
Adams, Henry Brooks
1838-1918 American Historian
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
America
Adams, John
1735-1826 Second President of the USA
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
America
Arnold, Matthew
1822-1888 British Poet Critic
We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans.
America
Askew, Ruben
It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.
America
Asquith, Margot
1864-1945 British Socialite
The Americans are violently oral. That s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
America
Auden, W. H.
1907-1973 Anglo-American Poet
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
America
Auden, W. H.
1907-1973 Anglo-American Poet
America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land.
America
Bailey, Philip James
1816-1902 British Poet
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.
America
Baldwin, James
1924-1987 American Author
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam...
America
Ballard, J. G.
1930 British Author
America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks.
America
Barrymore, John
1882-1942 American Actor
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
America
Bartholdi, Auguste
America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.
America
Bates, Katherine Lee
1859-1921 American Author
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
America
Baudrillard, Jean
French Postmodern Philosopher Writer
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
America
Baudrillard, Jean
French Postmodern Philosopher Writer
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
America
Beecher, Henry Ward
1813-1887 American Preacher Orator Writer
It is a noble land that God has given us: a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe.
America
Beveridge, Albert J.
American Senator
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
America
Bloom, Allan
1930-1992 American Educator Author
Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.
America
Boorstin, Daniel J.
1914 American Historian
The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.
America
Boorstin, Daniel J.
1914 American Historian
America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
America
Brown, John Mason
1800-1859 American Militant Abolitionist
America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.
America
Bunch, Charlotte
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
America
Burke, Edmund
1729-1797 British Political Writer Statesman
Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners.
America
Burke, Edmund
1729-1797 British Political Writer Statesman
America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
America
Burroughs, William S.
1914-1997 American Writer
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
America
Burroughs, William S.
1914-1997 American Writer
The history of the building of the American nation may justly be described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the problems that will confront the world tomorrow.
America
Butler, Nicholas
1862-1947 American Educationist
America is the best half-educated country in the world.
America
Butler, Nicholas
1862-1947 American Educationist
America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.
America
Byron, Lord
1788-1824 British Poet
I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.
America
Byron, Lord
1788-1824 British Poet
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
America
Chandler, Raymond
1888-1959 American Author
I have no further use for America. I wouldn t go back there if Jesus Christ was President.
America
Chaplin, Charlie
1889-1977 British Comic Actor Filmmaker
America s best buy is a telephone call to the right man.
America
Chase, Ilka
1905 American Author Actor
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
America
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
1874-1936 British Author
The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.
America
Ciardi, John
1916-1986 American Teacher Poet Writer
America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
America
Clemenceau, Georges
1841-1929 French Statesman
The business of America is business and the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.
America
Coolidge, Calvin
1872-1933 Thirtieth President of the USA
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
America
Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)
1894-1962 American Poet
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn t standing still.
America
Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)
1894-1962 American Poet
America is the world s living myth. There s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.
America
Delillo, Don
1926 American Author
If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.
America
Dickens, Charles
1812-1870 British Novelist
Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.
America
Dimnet, Ernest
1866-1954 French Clergyman
I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
America
Dylan, Bob
1941 American Musician Singer Songwriter
Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.
America
Eagleburger, Lawrence S.
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
America
Eco, Umberto
1929 Italian Novelist and critic
The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.
America
Eco, Umberto
1929 Italian Novelist and critic
The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.
America
Einstein, Albert
1879-1955 German-born American Physicist
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
America
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
1890-1969 Thirty-fourth President of the USA
There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.
America
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
1890-1969 Thirty-fourth President of the USA
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
America
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
1890-1969 Thirty-fourth President of the USA
I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem -- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?
America
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
1890-1969 Thirty-fourth President of the USA
Only Americans can hurt America.
America
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
1890-1969 Thirty-fourth President of the USA
In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
America
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
America
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
America
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
1803-1882 American Poet Essayist
If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don t deserve to survive, and probably won t.
America
Faulkner, William
1897-1962 American Novelist
America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.
America
Ferber, Edna
1887-1968 American Author
To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
America
Fiedler, Leslie
1917 American Literary Critic educator
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
America
Forster, Edward M.
1879-1970 British Novelist Essayist
We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.
America
Franklin, Benjamin
1706-1790 American Scientist Publisher Diplomat
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
America
Freud, Sigmund
1856-1939 Austrian Physician - Founder of Psychoanalysis
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
America
Freud, Sigmund
1856-1939 Austrian Physician - Founder of Psychoanalysis
If you don t know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
America
Frost, Robert
1875-1963 American Poet
What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
America
Fuentes, Carlos
1928 Mexican Novelist Short-Story Writer
America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.
America
Graham, Martha
1894-1991 American Dancer Teacher and Choreographer
The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
America
Gramm, Phil
Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.
America
Gunther, John
I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.
America
Harper, Michael S.
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
America
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
1804-1864 American Novelist Short Story Writer
By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of Negro Blood... is a Negro. Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classification; these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true.
America
Hayakawa, S. I.
1902-1992 Canadian Born American Senator Educator
America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.
America
Hegel, Georg
1770-1831 German Philosopher
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
America
Hoffer, Eric
1902-1983 American Author Philosopher
Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.
America
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
1809-1894 American Author Wit Poet
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
America
Housman, A. E.
1859-1936 British Poet Classical Scholar
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
America
Iyer, Pico
Travel Writer
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
America
James, Henry
1843-1916 American Author
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
America
James, Henry
1843-1916 American Author
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
America
James, Henry
1843-1916 American Author
For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.
America
Johnson, Lyndon B.
1908-1973 Thirty-sixth President of the USA
I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all.
America
Johnson, Lyndon B.
1908-1973 Thirty-sixth President of the USA
Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
America
Johnson, Samuel
1709-1784 British Author
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
America
Johnson, Samuel
1709-1784 British Author
Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. this is not the case.
America
Kennedy, John F.
1917-1963 Thirty-fifth President of the USA
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...
America
Keynes, John Maynard
1883-1946 British Economist
Knavery seems to be so much a the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.
America
King George III
1738-1820 King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760--1820)
I can never suppose this country so far lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant America independence; if that could ever be adopted I shall despair of this country being ever preserved from a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European States.
America
King George III
1738-1820 King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760--1820)
America is not a democracy, it s an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs called betters. Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.
America
King, Florence
1936 American Author Critic
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
America
Kissinger, Henry
1923 American Republican Politician Secretary of State
The trouble with us in America isn t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
America
Kronenberger, Louis
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
America
Lawrence, D. H.
1885-1930 British Author
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life s sacred spontaneity. They can t trust life until they can control it.
America
Lawrence, D. H.
1885-1930 British Author
America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.
America
Le Monde
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is...
America
Lewis, Sinclair
1885-1951 First American Novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature
I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
America
Lewis, Wyndham
1882-1957 British Author Painter
No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.
America
Lewis, Wyndham
1882-1957 British Author Painter
To me Americanism means an imperative duty to be nobler than the rest of the world.
America
London, Meyer
Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.
America
Macarthur, Douglas
1880-1964 American Army General in WW II
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
America
Macleish, Archibald
1892-1982 American Poet
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
America
Macleish, Archibald
1892-1982 American Poet
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
America
Mailer, Norman
1923 American Author
Sitting at the table doesn t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what s on that plate. Being here in America doesn t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn t make you an American.
America
Malcolm X
1925-1965 American Black Leader Activist
I don t see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.
America
Maritain, Jacques
1882-1973 French Philosopher
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
America
Mccarthy, Mary
1912-1989 American Author Critic
America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.
America
Mcguane, Thomas
People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.
America
Mead, Margaret
1901-1978 American Anthropologist
Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
America
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, naïve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.
America
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
America
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.
America
Miller, Henry
1891-1980 American Author
Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.
America
Navratilova, Martina
1956 American Tennis Player
If you think the United States has stood still, who built The largest shopping center in the world?
America
Nixon, Richard M.
1913-1994 Thirty-seventh President of the USA
It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.
America
Northcliffe, Lord
The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.
America
O'Brien, Conor Cruise
1917 Irish Historian Critic and Statesman
Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man s ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and cliché-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.
America
O'Casey, Sean
1884-1964 Irish Dramatist
America has run the world for at least the past 50 years, and when you re at the top that long, you forget what it s like in the valley. There are 5+ billion people out there now who are willing to study harder, work harder for less money and be more industrious than we are. And we re linked to them by technology. With telecommunications, you can have your bookkeeping done in Madra, India, for less than it costs here. Today technology can replace whole new industries, so you have to stay flexible. To survive today, you have to be able to walk on quicksand and dance with electrons.
America
Ogden, Frank
One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
America
O'Keeffe, Georgia
American painter
I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.
America
Olson, Charles
Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who s out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.
America
O'Rourke, P. J.
1947 American Journalist
America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.
America
Osborne, Robert
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
America
Paglia, Camille
1947 American Author Critic Educator
The voice of America has no undertones or overtones in it. It repeats its optimistic catchwords in a tireless monologue that has the slightly metallic sound of a gramophone.
America
Palmer, Vance
1885-1959 Australian Author Poet
The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.
America
Paz, Octavio
1914 Mexican Poet Essayist
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
America
Pope, Alexander
1688-1744 British Poet Critic Translator
It s difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn t available.
America
Reagan, Ronald
1911 Fortieth President of the USA Actor
Double, no triple, our troubles and we d still be better off than any other people on earth. It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.
America
Reagan, Ronald
1911 Fortieth President of the USA Actor
The rising power of the United States in world affairs requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism. Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side in the present world struggle but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities of the changing and convulsive world in which American policy must operate.
America
Reston, James
1909-1995 Dutch Born American Journalist
Thank God we re living in a country where the sky s the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television.
America
Rivers, Joan
1933 American Comedian Talk Show Host Actress
America is a great country, but you can t live in it for nothing.
America
Rogers, Will
1879-1935 American Humorist Actor
A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do -- namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.
America
Roosevelt, Eleanor
1884-1962 American First Lady Columnist Lecturer Humanitarian
I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
America
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
1882-1945 Thirty-second President of the USA
This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
America
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
1882-1945 Thirty-second President of the USA
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
America
Roosevelt, Theodore
1858-1919 Twenty-sixth President of the USA
The American people abhor a vacuum.
America
Roosevelt, Theodore
1858-1919 Twenty-sixth President of the USA
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
America
Rosenberg, Harold
1906-1978 American Art Critic Author
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
America
Santayana, George
1863-1952 American Philosopher Poet
America is a young country with an old mentality.
America
Santayana, George
1863-1952 American Philosopher Poet
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.
America
Seattle, Chief
1786-1866 American Indian Chief of the Suquamish
American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.
America
Sontag, Susan
1933 American Essayist
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
America
Sontag, Susan
1933 American Essayist
In America everything s about who s number one today.
America
Springsteen, Bruce
1949 American Musician Singer Songwriter
I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn t got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don t believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
America
Stark, Freya
1893-1993 British Travel Writer
America: It s like Britain, only with buttons.
America
Starr, Ringo
1940 The Beatles Pop Group on Drums
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
America
Stein, Gertrude
1874-1946 American Author
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
America
Stein, Gertrude
1874-1946 American Author
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
America
Steinbeck, John
1902-1968 American Author
The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog. In America he sets the tone. This is the first country where the common man could stand erect.
America
Stone, I. F.
1907-1989 American Author
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
America
Thatcher, Margaret
1925 British Stateswoman Prime Minister (1979-90)
To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.
America
Thomas, Norman
1884-1968 American Socialist Leader
America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
America
Thompson, Hunter S.
1939 American Journalist
The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
America
Tocqueville, Alexis De
1805-1859 French Social Philosopher
Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.
America
Tocqueville, Alexis De
1805-1859 French Social Philosopher
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
America
Toynbee, Arnold
1852-1883 British Economic Historian and Social Reformer
In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?
America
Twain, Mark
1835-1910 American Humorist Writer
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
America
Twain, Mark
1835-1910 American Humorist Writer
There isn t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
America
Twain, Mark
1835-1910 American Humorist Writer
On Thanksgiving Day, all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment -- half- time.
America
Unknown, Source
There are no second acts in American lives.
America
Unknown, Source
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter -- it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
America
Unknown, Source
America is a willingness of the heart.
America
Unknown, Source
America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, What is he? But What can he do?
America
Unknown, Source
American is a very difficult language mixed with English.
America
Unknown, Source
Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides.
America
Unknown, Source
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
America
Updike, John
1932 American Novelist Critic
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
America
Vidal, Gore
1925 American Novelist Critic
Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that s why you ought to be glad you re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they re doing.
America
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt
1922 American Novelist
It s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can t see.
America
Warhol, Andy
1930 American Artist Filmmaker
I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
America
Warren, Robert Penn
1905-1989 American Writer Poet
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
America
Welles, Orson
1915-1985 American Film Maker
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
America
Wharton, Edith
1862-1937 American Author
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable -- or at least deserving of support.
America
White, E(lwyn) B(rooks)
1899-1985 American Author Editor
Their manners, speech, dress, friendships, -- the freshness and candor of their physiognomy -- the picturesque looseness of their carriage -- their deathless attachment to freedom -- their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean -- the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states -- the fierceness of their roused resentment -- their curiosity and welcome of novelty -- their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy -- their susceptibility to a slight -- the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors -- the fluency of their speech -- their delight in music, a sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul -- their good temper and open-handedness -- the terrible significance of their elections, the President s taking off his hat to them, not they to him -- these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.
America
Whitman, Walt
1819-1892 American Poet
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
America
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
America
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
America
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.
America
Wilde, Oscar
1856-1900 British Author Wit
The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world s peoples.
America
Will, George F.
1941 American Political Columnist
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
America
Wilson, Woodrow T.
1856-1924 Twenty-eighth President of the USA
America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.
America
Wilson, Woodrow T.
1856-1924 Twenty-eighth President of the USA
The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.
America
Wilson, Woodrow T.
1856-1924 Twenty-eighth President of the USA
No... the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you -- he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.
America
Zangwill, Israel
1864-1926 British Writer
Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.
America
Ziglar, Zig
American Sales Trainer Author Motivational Speaker