America Quotes

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Li

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

Samuel Johnson

Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you.

June Jordan

I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Marg

It is a noble land that God has given us: a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe.

Albert J. Beveridge

I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.

Charlie Chaplin

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

The business of America is business and the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.

Calvin Coolidge

Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

I sometimes think we ought to bring a bill before Congress changing our national symbol from the eagle to the buffalo, because we are more like the buffalo than the eagle. The eagle is a powerful bird. It flies alone. It rises up into the sky with authority. It is master of all it surveys. The eagle is an individualist and was selected from among the rest of the birds to be our symbol. But the buffalo was never alone. It always ran in a herd with other buffaloes. And, friends, I call your attention that the buffaloes are gone from the open range, but the eagles are still soaring.

Norman Vincent Peale

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

Arnold J. Toynbee, (attributed)

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

Orson Welles

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

Norman Mailer

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism.

Spiro T. Agnew

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It

J. G. Ballard, interview in M, 1

In America everything's about who's number one today.

Bruce Springsteen

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

Woodrow Wilson

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

Woodrow Wilson

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

Woodrow Wilson