Motivational Quotes

America

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

- Oscar Wilde

Best Quotes about America

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Mark Twain

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

Bloom, Allan

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 young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.

O'Rourke, P. J.

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

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

Gunther, John

Only Americans can hurt America.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

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

10.

America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks.

Barrymore, John

11.

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

London, Meyer

12.

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

13.

In recent years, we've become enamored with our own past success. Lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We've become accustomed to the title of Military Superpower, forgetting the qualities that got us there. We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas, quality products and wise investments.

Barack Obama

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism -- that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.

Warren, Robert Penn

17.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

18.

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

Hoffer, Eric

19.

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.

20.

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

George Bernard Shaw

21.

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

22.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

23.

Double, no triple, our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth. It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.

Reagan, Ronald

24.

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.

Chandler, Raymond

25.

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

Brown, John Mason

26.

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

Freud, Sigmund

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

31.

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Osborne, Robert

32.

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

33.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Santayana, George

34.

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

Askew, Ruben

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

Hillary Rodham Clinton

39.

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

40.

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens.

George W. Bush

41.

I just want to say this. I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, "the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out," and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.

Tony Blair

42.

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

43.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

Baudrillard, Jean

48.

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

49.

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

Gramm, Phil

50.

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