Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

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

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

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

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

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.

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

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

Barack Obama

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

George Bernard Shaw

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

10.

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

Askew, Ruben

11.

Mccarthy, Mary

12.

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.

13.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

14.

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

15.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

16.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

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.

America is a willingness of the heart.

19.

I know starting careers in troubled times is a challenge, but it is also a privilege. Because it's moments like these that force us to try harder, dig deeper and to discover gifts we never knew we had. To find the greatness that lies within each of us. So don't ever shy away from that endeavor. Don't stop adding to your body of work. I can promise that you will be the better for that continued effort as will be this nation that we all love.

Barack Obama

20.

America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

Herbert Hoover

21.

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

22.

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

Iyer, Pico

23.

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.

24.

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

Judith Martin

25.

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

Oscar Wilde

26.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

27.

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

Fuentes, Carlos

28.

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

29.

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.

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.

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

32.

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

33.

The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Sontag, Susan

34.

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

35.

People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.

Mead, Margaret

36.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

Miller, Henry

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

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

43.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

44.

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

45.

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

Lyndon B. Johnson

46.

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

Jack Kerouac

47.

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

48.

No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.

Lewis, Wyndham

49.

America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land.

Bailey, Philip James

50.

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

Charles Luckman