America Quotes

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

Henry David Thoreau

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

Benjamin Harrison

Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

Samuel Johnson

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

Gertrude Stein

The Second Amendment reveals a profound principle of American government - The principle of civilian ascendency over the military.

William Orville Douglas

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday... The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.

Ayn Rand

It could probably be show by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain

We can now prove that large numbers of Americans are dying from sitting on their behinds.

Bruce B. Dan

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July I answer A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Frederick Douglas

The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens. As Americans, we are blessed with circumstances that protect our human rights and our religious freedom, but for many people around the world, deprivation and persecution have become a way of life.

Jimmy Carte

An American will tinker with anything he can put his hands on. But how rarely can he be persuaded to tinker with an abstract idea.

Leland Stowe

I was born an American I will live an American I shall die an American.

Daniel Webste

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money - - Then make money with money - - Then make lots of money with lots of money.

Paul Erdman

Tonight - To you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans - I ask for your support. On his Vietnam War policy.

Richard Milhous Nixon

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

George Will

I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

Ronald Reagan, Nov. 5, 1994

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

George Bernard Shaw

I hope that no American... will waste his franchise and throw away his vote by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of America and fell upon their knees. Then they fell upon the aborigines.

(Anon.)

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

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

Mike Royko, columnist

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

Margot Asquith

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, author Alexis de Tocqueville

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals of American society.

Robert Francis Kennedy

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

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Just what is it that America stands for If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self - Governing people.

Woodrow Wilson

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

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Gore Vidal

The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

Albert Einstein

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

Elizabeth II

I greet you as the shapers of American society.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Intellectually, I know that America is no better than any other country emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

Sinclair Lewis

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

A. E. Housman

One of the things that is wrong with America is that everybody who has done anything at all in his own field is expected to be an authority on every subject under the sun.

Elmer Davis