AMERICA QUOTES

• The American sign of civic progress is to tear down the familiar and erect the monstrous.
  ~ Shane Leslie ~
• Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
  ~ Oscar Wilde ~
• America is a young country with an old mentality.
  ~ George Santayana ~
• We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
  ~ Oscar Wilde ~
• To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
  ~ George Santayana ~
• The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
  ~ Henry David Thoreau ~
• The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
  ~ Henry David Thoreau ~
• One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
  ~ Carl Sandburg ~
• Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness.
  ~ Archibald Macleish ~
• In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
  ~ Gertrude Stein ~
• In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
  ~ Gertrude Stein ~
• In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
  ~ A. E. Housman ~
• In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
  ~ Walt Whitman ~
• 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 ~
• Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.
  ~ Allen Ginsberg ~
• Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
  ~ Samuel Johnson ~
• America, why are your libraries full of tears?
  ~ Allen Ginsberg ~
• America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
  ~ Oscar Wilde ~
• America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
  ~ George Santayana ~
• America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.
  ~ Oscar Wilde ~
• America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
  ~ Oscar Wilde ~
• I'm not sure that some of the food purists are in touch with what really goes on in American households.
  ~ Sandra Lee ~
• The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.
  ~ Eric Alterman ~
• Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's 'Courant,' it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.
  ~ Eric Alterman ~
• To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad.
  ~ Eric Alterman ~
• The magic kit we developed with Idea Village is an extraordinary success in 40,000 stores across America. The TV commercial we shot for it has produced amazing results - unbelievable.
  ~ Criss Angel ~
• Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
  ~ Conrad Black ~
• The American legal industry is a medieval guild in which the prosecutors, bar, and bench join hands to ensure that legal invoices are paid, no matter how excessive.
  ~ Conrad Black ~
• All my life, Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest, freest' country in the world. By most measurements, it was long a contender for that honor, and - among the larger countries, if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.
  ~ Conrad Black ~
• I think we recognize as Americans there are certain things that are just primary to the freedoms and liberties that we enjoy here and religious freedom is one of the most important things we as Americans cherish.
  ~ Ann Romney ~
• Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.
  ~ Malcolm Turnbull ~
• This film business, perhaps more so in America than in Europe, has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre, but in America, film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.
  ~ Jacqueline Bisset ~
• 'Good Morning America' exploited Joan Lunden's pregnancy, but you won't see me bringing my babies on the air. The only reason I'm talking about the babies at all is that they've been with me on the show since I became pregnant. After a while, I had to acknowledge this pumpkin tummy.
  ~ Jane Pauley ~
• I want people to think of me as a nice person. I really am so blessed. All of this has been a great experience and I thank the American public so much for putting me in this position. I appreciate every second of it.
  ~ Carrie Underwood ~
• American Idol transcends age, gender, ethnicity, everything.
  ~ Carrie Underwood ~
• The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.
  ~ Rita Mae Brown ~
• As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.
  ~ Julia Child ~
• You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
  ~ Wendell Phillips ~
• Most people I know are not hard-core religious people. They are what I would call 'lightly religious.' So I don't buy the notion that we can't laugh about religion in America.
  ~ Trey Parker ~
• I am living proof that the American dream still exists. It is still alive and well. There is only one trick, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and work very, very hard.
  ~ Paula Deen ~
• If Obama wanted to make radical changes to America's health long-term, all he has to do is treble the price of sugar and salt.
  ~ Jamie Oliver ~
• I want Americans to enjoy food. I want them to celebrate food. I want them to, on occasions, to have big cakes and great things. And I want them to indulge.
  ~ Jamie Oliver ~
• Just because the Americans are so good at rattling out accessible and cheap junk food, nobody looks twice when it comes to their food. But there are golden nuggets everywhere.
  ~ Jamie Oliver ~
• I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
  ~ Diane Wakoski ~
• It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.
  ~ Dick Cheney ~
• We have to make America the best place in the world to do business.
  ~ Dick Cheney ~
• There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors.
  ~ Eric Ries ~
• The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource - the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.
  ~ Eric Ries ~
• Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.
  ~ Dick Gregory ~
• America is an idea. And it's the solemn responsibility of each 'temporary' president to protect and nurture that noblest of all ideas - with integrity. This man, Mitt Romney, has shown - not through his experience, but through his actions and words - that he is unqualified to carry out that responsibility.
  ~ Jennifer Granholm ~
• It's easier to lecture women on sexual morality than it is to explain why all Americans shouldn't have comprehensive, fair, and equal health care coverage.
  ~ Martha Plimpton ~
• The word 'equality' shows up too much in our founding documents for anyone to pretend it's not the American way.
  ~ Martha Plimpton ~
• Black women have always been these vixens, these animalistic erotic women. Why can't we just be the sexy American girl next door?
  ~ Tyra Banks ~
• Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
  ~ James Wolcott ~
• Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
  ~ James Wolcott ~
• Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
  ~ James Wolcott ~
• 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.
  ~ Henry James ~
• As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
  ~ Angela Davis ~
• Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
  ~ Angela Davis ~
• Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.
  ~ Rob Sheffield ~
• 'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
  ~ Rob Sheffield ~
• 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
  ~ Rob Sheffield ~
• We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
  ~ Barbara Jordan ~
• What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise.
  ~ Barbara Jordan ~
• We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
  ~ Barbara Jordan ~
• Head Start's ability to improve the educational skills and opportunities of Latino children will be an important component of America's future success.
  ~ Joe Baca ~
• Latinos have fought in all of America's wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War. Many Latinos are fighting and dying for our country today in Iraq, just as several of their ancestors fought for freedom in Mexico over a century ago.
  ~ Joe Baca ~
• Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.
  ~ Joe Baca ~
• The Postal Service's unmatched ability to reach every household and business in America six days a week is a vital part of the nation's infrastructure.
  ~ Joe Baca ~
• America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
  ~ Frederick Douglass ~
• I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.
  ~ Dan Rather ~
• All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.
  ~ Mitch Daniels ~
• The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.
  ~ Mitch Daniels ~
• All great enterprises have a pearl of faith at their core, and this must be ours: that Americans are still a people born to liberty. That they retain the capacity for self-government. That, addressed as free-born, autonomous men and women of God-given dignity, they will rise yet again to drive back a mortal enemy.
  ~ Mitch Daniels ~
• The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.
  ~ Mitch Daniels ~
• Starting a new retirement plan for those below a certain age is something tens of millions of Americans have already been through at work.
  ~ Mitch Daniels ~
• Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.
  ~ Lafcadio Hearn ~
• Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or to great nobles.
  ~ Lafcadio Hearn ~
• Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man's life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.
  ~ Lafcadio Hearn ~
• With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
  ~ Mira Nair ~
• In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.
  ~ Mira Nair ~
• Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit the loss of the empire of the United States and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
  ~ James Hillman ~
• I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.
  ~ James Hillman ~
• I don't think the Palestinian people or Afghan children or some other things I'm concerned about are at the top of other people's agendas - not right now, when America is going through such a recession and people are suffering across the board financially. But I think all that will change.
  ~ Patti Smith ~
• The American education system couldn't be more badly directed or poorly funded if the Secretary of Education were Ed Wood.
  ~ Dennis Miller ~
• In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
  ~ Peter Ustinov ~
• The American consumer is also the American worker, and if we don't do something to protect our manufacturing base here at home, it is going to be hard to buy any retail goods.
  ~ Lindsey Graham ~
• CNN found that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America. Women admire her because she's strong and successful. Men admire her because she allows her husband to cheat and get away with it.
  ~ Jay Leno ~
• CNN found that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America. Women admire her because she's strong and successful. Men admire her because she allows her husband to cheat and get away with it.
  ~ Jay Leno ~
• I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.
  ~ Anthony Hopkins ~
• It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.
  ~ Warren Farrell ~
• I'm cute - and God I hate that. Because that's not cool. I'm like your niece, and nobody wants to date their niece. It's the chubby cheeks. The whole reason people voted for me on American Idol is because I'm an everyday, normal girl.
  ~ Kelly Clarkson ~
• I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.
  ~ George Will ~
• I decided to make 'Captain America' because I realized I wasn't doing the film because it terrified me. You can't make decisions based on fear.
  ~ Chris Evans ~
• You know, the reward for 'Captain America' is amazing. It's always fun to see a giant spectacle film and see the fun stuff - the special effects.
  ~ Chris Evans ~