Motivational Quotes

America

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

- Coolidge, Calvin

Best Quotes about America

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 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

Vidal, Gore

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

Judith Martin

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

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

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

In recent years, we've become enamored with our own past success. Lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We've become accustomed to the title of Military Superpower, forgetting the qualities that got us there. We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas, quality products and wise investments.

Barack Obama

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

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

Askew, Ruben

10.

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

Margot Asquith

11.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

12.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

13.

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

Bloom, Allan

14.

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

Freud, Sigmund

15.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

16.

In America everything's about who's number one today.

Springsteen, Bruce

17.

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

18.

I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.

Carl Sandburg

19.

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

20.

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

Woodrow Wilson

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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.

Butler, Nicholas

24.

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.

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand.

George W. Bush

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Lewis, Wyndham

31.

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.

32.

I know starting careers in troubled times is a challenge, but it is also a privilege. Because it's moments like these that force us to try harder, dig deeper and to discover gifts we never knew we had. To find the greatness that lies within each of us. So don't ever shy away from that endeavor. Don't stop adding to your body of work. I can promise that you will be the better for that continued effort as will be this nation that we all love.

Barack Obama

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

36.

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.

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

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

39.

The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog. In America he sets the tone. This is the first country where the common man could stand erect.

Stone, I. F.

40.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

There's the country of America, which you have to defend, but there's also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it's an idea. An idea that's supposed to be contagious.

Bono

44.

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.)

45.

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

Barack Obama

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

Stein, Gertrude

49.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

50.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore