Motivational Quotes

America

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

- Kissinger, Henry

Best Quotes about America

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

Wharton, Edith

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

Keynes, John Maynard

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

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

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

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

George W. Bush

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Vidal, Gore

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Jeffery F. Chamberlain

16.

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

Margot Asquith

17.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

Stein, Gertrude

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

American is a very difficult language mixed with English.

22.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

23.

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

24.

I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.

Chaplin, Charlie

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Judith Martin

28.

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

29.

A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable -- or at least deserving of support.

White, Elwyn Brooks

30.

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.

Charles Luckman

31.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

32.

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

Iyer, Pico

33.

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

34.

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

Bartholdi, Frederic Auguste

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Burke, Edmund

38.

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

39.

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

Freud, Sigmund

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

Stark, Freya

48.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

49.

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

50.

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