America Quotes

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

Theodore Roosevelt

America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Think of what would happen to us in America if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record.

Tom Masson

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

John Ciardi

I just want to say this. I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out, and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.

Tony Blai

Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

America has begun a spiritual reawakening. Faith and hope are being restored. Americans are turning back to God. Church attendance is up. Audiences for religious books and broadcasts are growing. And I do believe that he has begun to heal our blessed land.

President Ronald Reagan, to the National Association of Evangelicals, Columbus, Ohio

Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

Gore Vidal, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1993

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, Inaugural address, 2001

America is not like a blanket - One piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - Many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.

Jesse Louis Jackson

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

Margot Asquith

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

Woody Allen

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

James T. Farrell

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

Gloria Steinem

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

Edmund White

One difference between French appeasement and American appeasement is that France pays ransom in cash and gets its hostages back while the United States pays ransom in arms and gets additional hostages taken.

William Safire

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

Mike Royko, columnist

As I rejected amnesty, so I reject revenge. I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all the casualties of the tragic conflict of the past. On Americans who avoided conscription during the Vietnam War, to Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Gerald R. Ford

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

Benjamin Harrison

I express many absurd opinions, but I am not the first man to do it American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.

Edgar Watson Howe

Americans are overreachers overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses.

George Will

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike, Problems and Other Stories

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

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory. The Jews will come from everywhere from France, from Russia, from America, from Yemen. ... Their faith is their passport.

Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good - will, complacency thoughtlessness, and optimism.

James Harvey Robinson

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

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

Oscar Wilde

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.

Dan Quayle