Motivational Quotes

America

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

Best Quotes about America

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

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

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

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

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

In a country as big as the United States, you can find fifty examples of anything.

Jeffery F. Chamberlain

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

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.

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

10.

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

Hillary Rodham Clinton

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Bill Clinton

14.

There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

Twain, Mark

15.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

Stein, Gertrude

16.

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

Gunther, John

17.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Delillo, Don

18.

The history of the building of the American nation may justly be described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the problems that will confront the world tomorrow.

Butler, Nicholas

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Osborne, Robert

23.

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

Herbert Hoover

24.

America's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better.

Anthony Walton

25.

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

26.

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

Oscar Wilde

27.

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

28.

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

Chase, Ilka

29.

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.

Charles Luckman

30.

Their manners, speech, dress, friendships, -- the freshness and candor of their physiognomy -- the picturesque looseness of their carriage -- their deathless attachment to freedom -- their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean -- the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states -- the fierceness of their roused resentment -- their curiosity and welcome of novelty -- their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy -- their susceptibility to a slight -- the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors -- the fluency of their speech -- their delight in music, a sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul -- their good temper and open-handedness -- the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them, not they to him -- these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

Whitman, Walt

31.

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.

Macleish, Archibald

32.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.

Faulkner, William

33.

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

34.

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

Vidal, Gore

35.

It is a noble land that God has given us: a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe.

Beveridge, Albert J.

36.

In America everything's about who's number one today.

Springsteen, Bruce

37.

I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.

Harper, Michael S.

38.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Auden, W. H.

39.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

40.

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

Oscar Wilde

41.

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

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.

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

Ziglar, Zig

44.

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

45.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

Dylan, Bob

46.

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

George Bernard Shaw

47.

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.

48.

I believe America's best days are ahead of us because I believe that the future belongs to freedom, not to fear.

John Kerry

49.

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

50.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

Jack Kerouac