America Quotes

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.

A world in which others controlled the course of their own development... would be a world in which the American system would be seriously endangered.

Benjamin Cohen

Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.

William Golding

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

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

Paul Fussell

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

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.

Lyndon B. Johnson

All American cars are basically Chevrolets.

Herb Caen

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered... deeply, ... finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

George Washington, First Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

Hunter S. Thompson

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

James T. Farrell

It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate - To surmount every difficulty by resolution and contrivance.

Thomas Jefferson

Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before.

Luigi Barzini

If happiness truly consisted of physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be, I think, an American cow.

William Lyon Phelps

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

I am loving before I am patriotic: I am human before I am American.

A. F. Shaw

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

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

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

George Will

We Americans know - Although others appear to forget - The risk of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war. On ordering retaliatory action against North Vietnam.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thompson

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Jacques Martin Barzun

The secretary of education does not work for the education establishment. The secretary works for the American people.

William John Bennett

A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America.

Otto von Bismarck

I am often troubled as I try hard here to create a new sense of common purpose... that sometimes we forget that we are all in this because we are seeking a good that helps all Americans.

William Jefferson Clinton

There is a need for heroism in American life today.

Vicki Baum

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. referring to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

George Walker Bush

Life is very important to Americans.

Bob Dole

For any woman to success in American life she must first do two things Prepare herself for a profession, and marry a man who wants her to succeed as much as she does.

Cathleen Douglas

I wish that all Americans would realize that American politics is world politics.

Theodore Roosevelt

Qaddafi counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.

Ronald Reagan

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good - will, complacency thoughtlessness, and optimism.

James Harvey Robinson

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Henry Louis Mencken

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Woody Allen

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

Peter Ustinov

America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

George W. Bush