Motivational Quotes

America

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.

Best Quotes about America

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

Intellectually, I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

Sinclair Lewis

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Charles Luckman

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

America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.

Mcguane, Thomas

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.

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

10.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

14.

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.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Burke, Edmund

19.

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

Macleish, Archibald

20.

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

21.

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

Jeffery F. Chamberlain

22.

Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.

Navratilova, Martina

23.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Osborne, Robert

27.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

Woodrow Wilson

28.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

Welles, Orson

29.

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

30.

Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. this is not the case.

Kennedy, John F.

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

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

Shirley Chisholm

33.

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

Fuentes, Carlos

34.

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

Askew, Ruben

35.

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

36.

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

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

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.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Kissinger, Henry

42.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

America and its demons, Europe and its ghost.

Le Monde

46.

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

Ziglar, Zig

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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.

50.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

Wilde, Oscar