America Quotes

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

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

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory. The Jews will come from everywhere from France, from Russia, from America, from Yemen. ... Their faith is their passport.

Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe

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.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The chief business of the American people is business.

Calvin Coolidge, Speech in Washington, Jan. 17, 1925

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

George Bernard Shaw

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. ... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission. Announcing blockade of Cuba.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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.

John F. Kennedy

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

Sinclair Lewis

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

Irwin Edman

The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.

John F. Kennedy

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

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

I express many absurd opinions, but I am not the first man to do it American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Edgar Watson Howe

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

Richard Milhous Nixon

The Army has carried the American... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.

Tom Lehre

I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

George W. Bush

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - - That we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

Thomas Wolfe

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal".

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

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

Henry Mille

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring.

Marya Mannes

And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - Ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you - - Ask what you can do for your country.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1961

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

Albert Einstein, 1929

America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.

Garry Trudeau

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