Motivational Quotes

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.

Best Quotes about America

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Roosevelt, Theodore

In a country as big as the United States, you can find fifty examples of anything.

Jeffery F. Chamberlain

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.

Adams, Henry Brooks

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

Lewis, Sinclair

In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Dylan, Bob

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.

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

10.

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

11.

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Jimmy Carter

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

Fuentes, Carlos

15.

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

16.

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

17.

What's right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity - intellect and resources - to do some thing about them.

Henry Ford II

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.

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.

Mailer, Norman

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Kissinger, Henry

28.

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...

Ballard, J. G.

29.

That is the American story. People, just like you, following their passions, determined to meet the times on their own terms. They weren't doing it for the money. Their titles weren't fancy. But they changed the course of history and so can you.

Barack Obama

30.

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

Bloom, Allan

31.

Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.

Walt Whitman

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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.

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Intellectually, I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

Sinclair Lewis

37.

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

38.

America's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better.

Anthony Walton

39.

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

Gramm, Phil

40.

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

41.

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.)

42.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

43.

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

Reagan, Ronald

44.

I just want to say this. I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, "the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out," and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.

Tony Blair

45.

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

46.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

47.

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

48.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

49.

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

50.

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

Margaret Thatcher