Quotes about america

America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

— Walter Abish

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

— Henry Brooks Adams

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

— John Adams

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

— Matthew Arnold

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans.

— Ruben Askew

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

— Margot Asquith

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

— W. H. Auden

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

— W. H. Auden

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

— Philip James Bailey

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.

— James Baldwin

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's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam...

— J. G. Ballard

America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks.

— John Barrymore

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

— Frederic Auguste Bartholdi

America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

— Katherine Lee Bates

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.

— Jean Baudrillard

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.

— Jean Baudrillard

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

— Henry Ward Beecher

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

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

— John Mason Brown

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

— Charlotte Bunch

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

— Edmund Burke

Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners.

— Edmund Burke

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.

— William S. Burroughs

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

— William S. Burroughs

The history of the building of the American nation may justly be described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the problems that will confront the world tomorrow.

— Nicholas Butler

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

— Nicholas Butler

America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.

— Lord Byron

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

— Lord Byron

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.

— Raymond Chandler

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

— Charlie Chaplin

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

— Ilka Chase

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— John Ciardi

America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

— Georges Clemenceau

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

— Calvin Coolidge

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

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.

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

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.

— Don Delillo

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.

— Charles Dickens

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.

— Ernest Dimnet

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

— Bob Dylan

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

— Lawrence S. Eagleburger

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.

— Umberto Eco

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.

— Umberto Eco

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

— Albert Einstein

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

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Only Americans can hurt America.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— William Faulkner

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.

— Edna Ferber

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.

— Leslie Fiedler

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.

— Edward M. Forster

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.

— Benjamin Franklin

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Sigmund Freud

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

— Robert Frost

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

— Carlos Fuentes

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.

— Martha Graham

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

— Phil Gramm

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

— John Gunther

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

— Michael S. Harper

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.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.

— S. I. Hayakawa

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.

— Georg Hegel

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.

— Eric Hoffer

Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— A. E. Housman

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

— Pico Iyer

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.

— Henry James

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.

— Henry James

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.

— Henry James

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.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Samuel Johnson

Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. this is not the case.

— John F. Kennedy

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

— John Maynard Keynes

Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.

— King George III

I can never suppose this country so far lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant America independence; if that could ever be adopted I shall despair of this country being ever preserved from a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European States.

— King George III

America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs called betters. Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.

— Florence King

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Louis Kronenberger

America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.

— D. H. Lawrence

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

— D. H. Lawrence

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

— Le Monde

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is...

— Sinclair Lewis

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

— Wyndham Lewis

No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.

— Wyndham Lewis

To me Americanism means an imperative duty to be nobler than the rest of the world.

— Meyer London

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.

— Douglas Macarthur

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

— Archibald Macleish

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.

— Archibald Macleish