Motivational Quotes

America

America is a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.

- Rogers, Will

Best Quotes about America

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

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

London, Meyer

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

Margaret Thatcher

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

Bloom, Allan

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

Chase, Ilka

Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.

O'Casey, Sean

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

America has run the world for at least the past 50 years, and when you're at the top that long, you forget what it's like in the valley. There are 5+ billion people out there now who are willing to study harder, work harder for less money and be more industrious than we are. And we're linked to them by technology. With telecommunications, you can have your bookkeeping done in Madra, India, for less than it costs here. Today technology can replace whole new industries, so you have to stay flexible. To survive today, you have to be able to walk on quicksand and dance with electrons.

Ogden, Frank

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Reagan, Ronald

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

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

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.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

18.

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.)

19.

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

Barack Obama

20.

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

Bunch, Charlotte

21.

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Byron, Lord

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.

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

Bartholdi, Frederic Auguste

27.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

28.

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

Askew, Ruben

29.

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

Vidal, Gore

30.

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

31.

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

Hillary Rodham Clinton

32.

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

33.

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

Bill Clinton

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

Brown, John Mason

40.

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

Gunther, John

41.

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.

Miller, Henry

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

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

45.

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

46.

For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

47.

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.

48.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Gertrude Stein

49.

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

Ziglar, Zig

50.

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