America Quotes

America - A great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far - Reaching in purpose.

Herbert Hoove

Qaddafi counted on America to be passive. He counted wrong.

Ronald Reagan

America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

Woodrow Wilson

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

Benjamin Franklin

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.

George Frost Kennan

America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Jacques Martin Barzun

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

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration, from the cautious quest for what they knew or what they thought they knew was out there, to an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un - American act that could most easily defeat us.

William Orville Douglas

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

The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.

William O. Douglas

Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.

John Ashcroft

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

Irwin Edman

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

Richard Milhous Nixon

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

American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced.

Elinor Glyn

Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

Woodrow Wilson

The 100% American is 99% an idiot.

George Bernard Shaw

I think that the Communist Party as a political organization is of no danger to the United States. It has no following and has been disregarded by the American people for many, many years.

Robert F. Kennedy, "A Thousand Days, " by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. [1965]

When even one American - - who has done nothing wrong - - Is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth - - Then all Americans are in peril.

Harry S Truman

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

George Santayana

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.

Dwight D Eisenhowe

And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - Ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Jimmy Carte

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1882