America Quotes - Page 17

• That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.

  Herman Melville

  Australia, Sides, Spheres

  Herman Melville (2008). “Moby-Dick”, p.121, Velvet Element Books

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• Nothing means anything here. When they pull down an outstanding building, no one objects. Oh, maybe there's a wee protest from some collectors or something who take a picture of it before it vanishes.

  Billy Connolly

  Mean, Building, Outstanding

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• In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild, but that letters and newspapers arrive at least once a week.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Cabins, Valleys, Michigan

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• In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Work, Animal

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• In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.

  Brooks Atkinson

  Play, Optimism, Problem

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• A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Home, Exhibitions, Way

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• The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Europe, Rift, Gaps

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Important, Demand, Fool

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.91, Verso

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• I will get things done for America.... Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground.... Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year. I am an Americorps volunteer.

  William J. Clinton

  Adversity, Commitment, Years

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• There is a need for heroism in American life today.

  Vicki Baum

  Life, Time, Role Models

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• American working men are principals in the three-member team of capital, management, labor. Never have they regarded themselves as a servile class that could attain freedom only through destruction of the industrial economy.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Team, Men, Class

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• Every gathering of Americans-whether a few on the porch of a crossroads store or massed thousands in a great stadium-is the possessor of a potentially immeasurable influence on the future.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Gathering, Influence, Crossroads

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• I don't think the United States needs superpatriots. We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don't need these people that are more patriotic than you or anyone else.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Patriotic, Thinking, People

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• European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

  James A. Baldwin

  Class, Choices, Intellectual

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• What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.

  James A. Baldwin

  Country, Believe, Hero

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• How can I explain the difference to me between America and Russia?.. the America I've known is a place where men on horseback escort union marchers, the Russia I've known is a place where men on horseback slaughter young Socialists and Jews.

  Golda Meir

  Men, Russia, Differences

  Interview with Oriana Fallaci, Ms. Magazine, April 1973.

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• America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it's tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn't solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it's still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?

  Golda Meir

  Country, Opportunity, Government

  Interview with Oriana Fallaci, Ms. Magazine, April 1973.

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• In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Writing, Garden, Order

  Alfred North Whitehead, Lucien Price (2001). “Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead”, p.164, David R. Godine Publisher

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• America's view of apartheid is simple and straightforward: We believe it is wrong. We condemn it. And we are united in hoping for the day when apartheid will be no more.

  Ronald Reagan

  Believe, Simple, Government

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1988). “Ronald Reagan”

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• If we don't want to see the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Sea, Borders

  Reagan, Ronald (1988). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1986”, p.297, Best Books on

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• The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.

  Herbert Hoover

  Party, People, Leader

  Hoover, Herbert (1974). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Herbert Hoover, 1929”, p.554, Best Books on

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• We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.

  Jimmy Carter

  Faith, Confidence, Important

  Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence, delivered 15 July, 1979

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• A turning point in modern history.

  Robert Frost

  History, Modern, Turning Points

  Robert Frost (1975). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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• Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.

  Emma Goldman

  Country, Silly, Men

  Emma Goldman (2016). “Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926”, p.57, PM Press

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• Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Life, Wisdom, Real

  Allen Ginsberg (2015). “The Essential Ginsberg”, p.178, Penguin UK

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