Quotes about america

"America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing."

Delillo, Don on america   

"If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe."

Dickens, Charles on america   

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"Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room."

Dimnet, Ernest on america   

"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   

"Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible."

Eagleburger, Lawrence S. on america   

"There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition."

Eco, Umberto on america   

"The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad."

Eco, Umberto on america   

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

Einstein, Albert on america
6 fans of this quote   

"Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America."

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on america   

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on america   

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on america   

"I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem -- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?"

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on america   

"Only Americans can hurt America."

Eisenhower, Dwight D. on america
4 fans of this quote   

"In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on america   

"I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on america
3 fans of this quote   

"We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on america
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"If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t."

Faulkner, William on america
3 fans of this quote   

"America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world."

Ferber, Edna on america   

"To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history."

Fiedler, Leslie on america   

"America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large."

Forster, Edward M. on america   

"We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information."

Franklin, Benjamin on america   

"America is a mistake, a giant mistake."

Freud, Sigmund on america
7 fans of this quote   

"America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success."

Freud, Sigmund on america
8 fans of this quote   

"If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia."

Frost, Robert on america
3 fans of this quote   

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

Fuentes, Carlos on america
3 fans of this quote   

"America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage."

Graham, Martha on america   

"The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people."

Gramm, Phil on america   

"Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea."

Gunther, John on america   

"I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results."

Harper, Michael S. on america   

"No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."

Hawthorne, Nathaniel on america   

"By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of Negro Blood... is a Negro. Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classification; these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true."

Hayakawa, S. I. on america   

"America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe."

Hegel, Georg on america   

"The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility."

Hoffer, Eric on america   

"Good Americans when they die, go to Paris."

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on america
3 fans of this quote   

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

Housman, A. E. on america   

"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   

"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them."

James, Henry on america
3 fans of this quote   

"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master."

James, Henry on america   

"No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life."

James, Henry on america   

"For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground."

Johnson, Lyndon B. on america