Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

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

Oscar Wilde

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

America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.

Graham, Martha

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

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

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

Byron, Lord

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

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.

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

Gramm, Phil

10.

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

Walt Whitman

11.

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.

12.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.

Faulkner, William

13.

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

Reagan, Ronald

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

18.

America is a willingness of the heart.

19.

I'm not going to quit. Why should I quit? This country is worth fighting for.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

20.

Only Americans can hurt America.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

21.

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

Fuentes, Carlos

22.

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

23.

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused û preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

George W. Bush

24.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

25.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

26.

I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem -- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

27.

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

28.

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Rosenberg, Harold

29.

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

30.

The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

Einstein, Albert

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

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

34.

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

George Bernard Shaw

35.

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

Oscar Wilde

36.

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

37.

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

Dylan, Bob

38.

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

39.

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

Kissinger, Henry

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

Gunther, John

42.

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

London, Meyer

43.

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

44.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

46.

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

Ziglar, Zig

47.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.