Motivational Quotes

America

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

- Bloom, Allan

Best Quotes about America

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

Chase, Ilka

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.

Beveridge, Albert J.

America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Byron, Lord

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

Margot Asquith

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.

Charles Luckman

America has run the world for at least the past 50 years, and when you're at the top that long, you forget what it's like in the valley. There are 5+ billion people out there now who are willing to study harder, work harder for less money and be more industrious than we are. And we're linked to them by technology. With telecommunications, you can have your bookkeeping done in Madra, India, for less than it costs here. Today technology can replace whole new industries, so you have to stay flexible. To survive today, you have to be able to walk on quicksand and dance with electrons.

Ogden, Frank

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.

10.

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

Kissinger, Henry

11.

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

Brown, John Mason

12.

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

13.

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.)

14.

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

Dylan, Bob

15.

America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, What is he? But What can he do?

16.

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

Arnold Toynbee

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.

Bobcat Goldthwaite

21.

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.

King, Florence

22.

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.

Lewis, Wyndham

23.

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

Reagan, Ronald

24.

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Wharton, Edith

25.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.

Seattle, Chief

26.

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

27.

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

Gunther, John

28.

Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides.

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

32.

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.

33.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

34.

America is just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

Thompson, Hunter S.

35.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

36.

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

37.

There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

Twain, Mark

38.

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Rosenberg, Harold

39.

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

40.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

41.

No... the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you -- he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.

Zangwill, Israel

42.

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.

43.

Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.

Navratilova, Martina

44.

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

45.

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

46.

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.

Louis D. Brandeis

47.

Only Americans can hurt America.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

48.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

49.

It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.

Northcliffe, Lord

50.

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

Bartholdi, Frederic Auguste