AMERICA QUOTES IV
quotations about America
Deep in the heart of every American, I think there burns a flame. It's an inheritance from every generation of Americans that has come before us. That's why we have overcome every crisis we have ever faced before. It's what makes this nation so special, why we stand apart. That flame is not going to be extinguished in this moment. If our leadership does its part, the American people will do more than their part.
JOE BIDEN
speech on Coronavirus, March 23, 2020
We speak with pride and admiration of that little band of Americans who overcame insuperable odds to set this nation on course 200 years ago. But our glory didn't end with them. Americans ever since have emulated their deeds.
RONALD REAGAN
State of the Union address, Jan. 26, 1982
The chief business of the American people is business.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
speech, Jan. 17, 1925
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
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
address to U.S. House of Representatives, Jul. 4, 1821
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
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.
GEORGE CARLIN
standup routine
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.
CHRIS ABANI
"Chris Abani on the stories of Africa", TED conference
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
America needs to be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
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
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
"American Names"
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
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box -- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
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
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
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
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
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
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