America Quotes

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

Arnold Toynbee

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

David Riesman

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Theodore Harold White

I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.

Daniel Webste

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

Thomas Jefferson

In America, one gets as much justice as one can afford. 1966.

Charles Stanton

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

John Ciardi

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

Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long.

Hunter S. Thompson

I have one of those real old American built cars. The kind that just PUNCHES through accidents.

Kevin Rooney

Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans.

Alf Landon, during his speech in his presidential campaign against FDR

The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money - - Then make money with money - - Then make lots of money with lots of money.

Paul Erdman

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell.

H. L. Mencken

America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.

Garry Trudeau

America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

George W. Bush

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Let us talk sense to the American people. Let us tell them the truth, that there are not gains without pains.

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno

My fellow Americans, I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. This danger will not go away it will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now.

Ronald Reagan

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.

Marlene Dietrich

Anglo - Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

William Jennings Bryan

I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities - A sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Benjamin Franklin

I was born an American I will live an American I shall die an American.

Daniel Webste

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Lillian Hellman

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you - - Ask what you can do for your country.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1961

American can do better, and help is on the way.

John Kerry, speech in 2004

The story of my boyhood and that of my brothers is important only because it could happen in any American family. It did, and will again.

Earl Eisenhowe

If we take the route of the permanent handout, the American character will itself be impoverished. Proposal to reform welfare programs.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead.

Sinclair Lewis

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

George Bernard Shaw

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.

Michael Parenti

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear - Cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which leave us to wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing.

Gamel Abdel Nasse

I wish that all Americans would realize that American politics is world politics.

Theodore Roosevelt

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

John Dewey

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

Sinclair Lewis