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

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

Vidal, Gore

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.

Paz, Octavio

America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.

Louis D. Brandeis

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

Arnold Toynbee

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

Bartholdi, Frederic Auguste

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

Woodrow Wilson

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

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

10.

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

Gramm, Phil

11.

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

12.

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

13.

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

Macleish, Archibald

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.

19.

In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

20.

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

Oscar Wilde

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

George Bernard Shaw

25.

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

26.

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

27.

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Osborne, Robert

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Margaret Thatcher

31.

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

Oscar Wilde

32.

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

33.

America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.

Chase, Ilka

34.

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

Askew, Ruben

35.

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.

36.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

James, Henry

37.

I can never suppose this country so far lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant America independence; if that could ever be adopted I shall despair of this country being ever preserved from a state of inferiority and consequently falling into a very low class among the European States.

King George III

38.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

39.

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

Walt Whitman

40.

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

41.

I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

Olson, Charles

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.

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

44.

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

Judith Martin

45.

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.

46.

America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.

Bobcat Goldthwaite

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

Eco, Umberto

50.

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

George W. Bush