Motivational Quotes

America

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about America

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

Frost, Robert

I believe America's best days are ahead of us because I believe that the future belongs to freedom, not to fear.

John Kerry

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

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

Vidal, Gore

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

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

10.

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

11.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

Miller, Henry

12.

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

Gramm, Phil

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Oscar Wilde

16.

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

Auden, W. H.

17.

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.

Thomas, Norman

18.

America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.

Laurence J. Peter

19.

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

20.

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

Arnold Toynbee

21.

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.

22.

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

Starr, Ringo

23.

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.

Burroughs, William S.

24.

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

25.

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

Sinclair Lewis

26.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

27.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Mark Twain

28.

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.

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.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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.

32.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

33.

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.

34.

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

London, Meyer

35.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Gertrude Stein

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

Lawrence, D. H.

39.

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

Margot Asquith

40.

America is a willingness of the heart.

41.

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.

42.

If you think the United States has stood still, who built The largest shopping center in the world?

Nixon, Richard M.

43.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

Jack Kerouac

44.

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.

45.

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.

Auden, W. H.

46.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

47.

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

48.

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.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

49.

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.

50.

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