America Quotes

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore Harold White

Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness.

Archibald MacLeish

Americans become unhappy and vicious because their preoccupation with amassing possessions obliterates their loneliness. This is why production in America seems to be on such an endless upward spiral: every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

Philip Saltie

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

W. Somerset Maugham

There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo - Americans... Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 1835

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide - Open spaces surrounded by teeth.

Charles Luckman

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

Arnold Toynbee

We Americans want peace, and it is now evident that we must be prepared to demand it. For other peoples have wanted peace, and the peace they received was the peace of death.

Rev. Francis J. Spellman, Archbishop of New York. 22 September, 1940

A venturesome minority will always be eager to get off on their own... let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - That is the right and privilege of any free American.

16 Idaho Law Review 407, 420 - 1980.

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.

Geoffrey Cottrell

I think on - Stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.

Shelley Winters

The 100% American is 99% an idiot.

George Bernard Shaw

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.

Charles De Gaulle

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.

Michael Parenti

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

Irwin Edman

While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.

Ronald Reagan

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

Jesse Louis Jackson

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

Harry S Truman

In order to be able to live in America I must be unafraid to live anywhere in it, and I must be able to live in the fashion and with whom I choose.

Alice Walke

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America (1936)

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Gore Vidal

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.

John Adams

The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.

Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - A date which will live on in infamy - The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress, Dec. 8, 1941

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans allBy uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.

John Dickinson

The American ideal is youth - - Handsome, empty youth.

Henry Mille

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Thomas Jefferson

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

H. L. Mencken

Americans are overreachers overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses.

George Will

There are three social classes in America upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin

I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

James Thurbe

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished. Proposal to reform welfare programs.

Richard Milhous Nixon

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.

Dwight David Eisenhowe

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - Indeed, inevitable - The United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970

There is a homely old adage which runs: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

Theodore Roosevelt, Speech in Chicago, 3 Apr. 1903