Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

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.

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

The voice of America has no undertones or overtones in it. It repeats its optimistic catchwords in a tireless monologue that has the slightly metallic sound of a gramophone.

Palmer, Vance

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

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

Steinbeck, John

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

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

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

Keynes, John Maynard

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

10.

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

Auden, W. H.

11.

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

Dylan, Bob

12.

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

Macleish, Archibald

13.

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

Lewis, Sinclair

14.

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

Kissinger, Henry

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Reagan, Ronald

18.

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

Ziglar, Zig

19.

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

20.

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

Oscar Wilde

21.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

22.

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

23.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

24.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

25.

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.

Miller, Henry

26.

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

27.

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

28.

America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.

Mcguane, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Margot Asquith

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

35.

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

36.

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.

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.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Pope, Alexander

39.

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

Askew, Ruben

40.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

41.

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

Starr, Ringo

42.

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

Springsteen, Bruce

43.

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

Arnold Toynbee

44.

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

Walt Whitman

45.

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.

46.

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.

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

50.

Only Americans can hurt America.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.