Motivational Quotes

America

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

- Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Best Quotes about America

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

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

America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land.

Bailey, Philip James

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.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

George Santayana

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

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.

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

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

10.

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

Walt Whitman

11.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

Oscar Wilde

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Gramm, Phil

17.

America is a willingness of the heart.

18.

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

Vidal, Gore

19.

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

20.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

21.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

22.

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

23.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower

24.

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

25.

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

Maritain, Jacques

26.

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

Mark Twain

27.

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

28.

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

30.

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

31.

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

Margot Asquith

32.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...

Keynes, John Maynard

33.

American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

Iyer, Pico

34.

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

35.

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

36.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

37.

No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.

Lewis, Wyndham

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

Roosevelt, Theodore

41.

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

Margaret Thatcher

42.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

43.

America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations.

Lyndon B. Johnson

44.

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

Fuentes, Carlos

45.

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.

Mccarthy, Mary

46.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Baudrillard, Jean

47.

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

George Bernard Shaw

48.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see.

Warhol, Andy

49.

America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

Herbert Hoover

50.

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