Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

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

Brown, John Mason

America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.

Bunch, Charlotte

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

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

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

Einstein, Albert

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

Burke, Edmund

America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, What is he? But What can he do?

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

If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.

Frost, Robert

No... the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you -- he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.

Zangwill, Israel

10.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Burroughs, William S.

11.

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

12.

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.

Georg W. Hegel

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

There's the country of America, which you have to defend, but there's also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it's an idea. An idea that's supposed to be contagious.

Bono

16.

America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

Ferber, Edna

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

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.

24.

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

Auden, W. H.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

Burroughs, William S.

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.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

Lewis, Wyndham

31.

The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.

Will, George F.

32.

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

33.

I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.

Shirley Chisholm

34.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde

35.

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

36.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Margaret Thatcher

37.

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

38.

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

Oscar Wilde

39.

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

40.

Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion; they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish, that solutions wait somewhere for all problems, like brides.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Bloom, Allan

44.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Adams, Henry Brooks

45.

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

Gramm, Phil

46.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Ronald Reagan

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Margot Asquith

50.

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

Oscar Wilde