Motivational Quotes

America

There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not.

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about America

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

Stein, Gertrude

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.

Kennedy, John F.

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

It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.

Reagan, Ronald

America is a willingness of the heart.

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

Askew, Ruben

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

Barrymore, John

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

Arnold Toynbee

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

Walt Whitman

10.

A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do -- namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see.

Warhol, Andy

12.

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.

Asquith, Margot

13.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

Stark, Freya

14.

The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.

Will, George F.

15.

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

Bailey, Philip James

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

Woodrow Wilson

18.

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

19.

America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.

Starr, Ringo

20.

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

Barack Obama

21.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

22.

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.

George W. Bush

23.

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

24.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

25.

Double, no triple, our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth. It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.

Reagan, Ronald

26.

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.

O'Casey, Sean

27.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin

28.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

O'Keeffe, Georgia

29.

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

Dylan, Bob

30.

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

George Bernard Shaw

31.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Warren, Robert Penn

32.

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

Kissinger, Henry

33.

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

Iyer, Pico

34.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

35.

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

36.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore

37.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter -- it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

38.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

Mead, Margaret

39.

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

Burke, Edmund

40.

Thank God we're living in a country where the sky's the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television.

Rivers, Joan

41.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

42.

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused û preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

George W. Bush

43.

I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

Olson, Charles

44.

American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.

Sontag, Susan

45.

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

Auden, W. H.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

W. Somerset Maugham

49.

America is a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.

Rogers, Will

50.

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