America Quotes

America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.

Gerald Early

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

Margot Asquith

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

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

Ernest Hemingway

The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.

William Fullbright

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear - Cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which leave us to wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing.

Gamel Abdel Nasse

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.

Mark Twain

We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we created.

Waldo Frank

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first... Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Richard Milhous Nixon

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

An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

Charles Darwin

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

Let me say with a Georgia accent that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.

David Dean Rusk

There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

Dwight D. Eisenhowe

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

In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.

Groucho Marx

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

John Ciardi

Anglo - Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

William Jennings Bryan

I had always loved beautiful and artistic things, though before leaving America I had had a very little chance of seeing any.

Emma Albani

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

Mary Ellen Kelly

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.

Will Rogers

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 have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

Henry G. Strauss

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

(Anon.)

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Carl Sandburg

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

George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft

The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.

George Frost Kennan

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

Theodore Roosevelt

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

I think that the Communist Party as a political organization is of no danger to the United States. It has no following and has been disregarded by the American people for many, many years.

Robert F. Kennedy, "A Thousand Days, " by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. [1965]

Let us talk sense to the American people. Let us tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

I epitomize America.

John Denve

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

Gore Vidal

Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.

E. B. White

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