Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.

Dinesh D'Souza

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

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.

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

Rogers, Will

America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

Abish, Walter

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Mccarthy, Mary

10.

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

11.

Knavery seems to be so much a the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.

King George III

12.

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.

13.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

14.

America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.

Bunch, Charlotte

15.

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

Oscar Wilde

16.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore

17.

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

Arnold Toynbee

18.

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

Kissinger, Henry

19.

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

Byron, Lord

20.

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

21.

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

22.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...

Keynes, John Maynard

23.

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

24.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

25.

American is a very difficult language mixed with English.

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Vidal, Gore

29.

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

30.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde

31.

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

32.

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.

Macarthur, Douglas

33.

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

34.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

Butler, Nicholas

35.

Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.

Ziglar, Zig

36.

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

37.

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

38.

I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.

Miller, Henry

39.

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.

40.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Osborne, Robert

46.

On Thanksgiving Day, all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment -- half- time.

47.

Their manners, speech, dress, friendships, -- the freshness and candor of their physiognomy -- the picturesque looseness of their carriage -- their deathless attachment to freedom -- their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean -- the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states -- the fierceness of their roused resentment -- their curiosity and welcome of novelty -- their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy -- their susceptibility to a slight -- the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors -- the fluency of their speech -- their delight in music, a sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul -- their good temper and open-handedness -- the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to him -- these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

Whitman, Walt

48.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

49.

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.

Georg W. Hegel

50.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)