AMERICA QUOTES IV

quotations about America

America quote

What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM

"Them", Lapham's Quarterly: Foreigners, winter 2014

Tags: Lewis H. Lapham


Well, America is never a laughingstock because it's too powerful for that. But people do want clarity and consistency.

TONY BLAIR

interview, Politico, September 25, 2017


He is still trying to keep up with America, as it changes styles and costumes and vocabulary, as it dances ahead ever young, ever younger.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit at Rest

Tags: John Updike


To be black in America is to walk with fury.

NATHAN MCCALL

To Be Black in America Is to Walk with Fury


The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

GEORGE CARLIN

standup routine


America is aggressive. America is a society that is used to aggression. So they listen to news about crimes in the same way they listen to the weather forecast. Most of these incidents appear strange to any foreigner. For example, one day American television reported two bizarre incidents. The first one was in Miami. One of the workers in a factory did not like the work shifts, so he shot and killed nine people and wounded three others. In the second incident, a man kidnapped two young girls and raped them. We should ask ourselves, is crime in American society more frequent and more dangerous than it is in any other society? Or does it just appear that way because everything is reported and not concealed?

KARIMA KAMAL

"An Egyptian Girl in America", America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature


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

GORE VIDAL

Screening History

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It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State -- ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios -- burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man ... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.

LORD ACTON

The History of Freedom in Antiquity

Tags: Lord Acton, authority


I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

DON DELILLO

The Names

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Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

MARTIN AMIS

"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988", Visiting Mr. Nabokov and Other Excursions

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America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. And we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words, within our borders and around the world. We are shaped by every culture. Drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.

BARACK OBAMA

speech, Jun. 4, 2009

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America has seen tough times before. We've always known how to get through them. And we've always believed our best days are ahead of us. I believe that still. But we must rise to the occasion, as we always have; change what must be changed; and make the future better than the past.

JOHN MCCAIN

speech, Jun. 3, 2008

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In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

EDWIN H. LAND

address at MIT, "Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science", May 22, 1957

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Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles.

TOM ROBBINS

Another Roadside Attraction

Tags: Tom Robbins, money


America is much more than a country. It's an ideal, a value system. Put simply, it's the best idea the world has ever had. That's why American greatness and leadership is indispensable to civilization, as we know it.

NICK ADAMS

"Political correctness is destroying America. That's why I am on a mission to crush it", FOX News, February 25, 2016


This is America and I'll make as much noise as I want so just shut your own mouth.

GARRISON KEILLOR

Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon

Tags: Garrison Keillor, freedom of speech


It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people -- women as well as men.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

speech after her arrest for voting in the 1872 presidential election

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I still believe in a place called Hope, a place called America.

BILL CLINTON

speech at Democratic National Convention, August 29, 1996

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I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation -- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.

JOHN STEINBECK

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

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France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

"The Swimmers", Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 19, 1929

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald