"I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged."

Dylan, Bob on america
3 fans of this quote   

"American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams."

Iyer, Pico on america
8 fans of this quote   

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

Johnson, Samuel on america   

"America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good."

Mcguane, Thomas on america   

"I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught."

Maritain, Jacques on america   

"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."

Mailer, Norman on america
4 fans of this quote   

"The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it."

Macleish, Archibald on america   

"Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live."

Macarthur, Douglas on america   

"America and its demons, Europe and its ghost."

Le Monde on america
4 fans of this quote   

"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."

Kronenberger, Louis on america   

"Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be..."

Keynes, John Maynard on america
3 fans of this quote   

"I am willing to love all mankind, except an American."

Johnson, Samuel on america
3 fans of this quote   

"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still."

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.) on america
5 fans of this quote   

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

Coolidge, Calvin on america   

"Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field."

Baldwin, James on america   

"America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land."

Bailey, Philip James on america   

"The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness."

Woolf, Virginia on war
7 fans of this quote   

"Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless."

Vauvenargues, Marquis De on war
4 fans of this quote   

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

Miller, Henry on war
9 fans of this quote   

"To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize."

Breton, Andre on war   

"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright."

Benjamin, Walter on war
8 fans of this quote   

"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice."

Toynbee, Arnold on apathy   

"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

Woolf, Virginia on apathy
6 fans of this quote   

"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world."

Baudrillard, Jean on america   

"Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society."

Baudrillard, Jean on america
3 fans of this quote   

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

Ciardi, John on america
3 fans of this quote   

"There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on america
4 fans of this quote   

"America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man."

Chase, Ilka on america   

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

Chaplin, Charlie on america
6 fans of this quote   

"America is the best half-educated country in the world."

Butler, Nicholas on america
5 fans of this quote   

"America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting."

Burroughs, William S. on america
4 fans of this quote   

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers."

Burroughs, William S. on america   

"America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got."

Bunch, Charlotte on america
3 fans of this quote   

"Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on america
3 fans of this quote   

"The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic."

Thurber, James on apathy   

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."

Tocqueville, Alexis De on conformity
4 fans of this quote   

"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."

Toynbee, Arnold on civilization   

"The human race has improved everything, but the human race."

Stevenson, Adlai E. on civilization   

"To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay."

Orwell, George on civilization   

"The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture."

Miller, Henry on civilization