America Quotes - Page 18

• Never, I say, had a country so many openings to happiness as this.... Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm.... The remembrance then of what is past, if it operates rightly must inspire her with the most laudable of an ambition, that of adding to the fair fame she began with. The world has seen her great adversity.... Let then, the world see that she can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to the bravest virtue in time of war.

  Thomas Paine

  Country, War, Adversity

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• Men of widely divergent views in our own country live in peace together because they share certain common aspirations which are more important than their differences.... The common responsibility of all Americans is to become effective, helpful participants in a way of life that blends and harmonizes the fiercely competitive demands of the individual and society.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Country, Responsibility, Men

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• The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

  John Dos Passos

  Civilization, People, Arms

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• Gerald Ford was unknown throughout America. Now he's unknown throughout the world.

  Groucho Marx

  Success, World, Gerald Ford

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• The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Men, Thinking, Make You Think

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• The promise of our country is that the rules are fair. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can earn your share of America's blessings. Those are the beliefs I learned from my parents.

  Geraldine Ferraro

  Country, Hard Work, Blessing

  Vice Presidential Nomination Acceptance Address, delivered 19 July 1984 at the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco

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• America remained a land of promise for lovers of freedom. Even Byron, at a moment when he was disgusted with Napoleon for not committing suicide, wrote an eloquent stanza in praise of Washington.

  Bertrand Russell

  Suicide, Land, Promise

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Fact and Fiction”, p.11, Routledge

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• In the mighty and almost limitless potential of American industry-the brilliance and rugged determination of its leaders; the skill, energy and patriotism of its workers-there has been welded an almost impregnable defense against the evil designs of any who would threaten the security of the American continent. It is indeed the most forceful and convincing argument yet evolved to restrain the irresponsibility of those who would recklessly bring down upon the good and peace-loving peoples of all the nations of the earth the disaster of total war.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Determination, War, Skills

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• We are America.
  We are the coffin fillers.
  We are the grocers of death.
  We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

  Anne Sexton

  United States, Coffins, Cauliflower

  Anne Sexton, “The Firebombers”

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• We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
  why American men think that success is everything
  when they know that eighty percent of them are not
  going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
  if they are not why do they not keep on being
  interested in the things that interested them when
  they were college men and why American men different
  from English men do not get more interesting as they
  get older.

  Gertrude Stein

  Success, College, Men

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• The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

  Margaret Mead

  Success, People, Today

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• [Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

  Nora Ephron

  Meaningful, Educational, College

  Nora Ephron (1991). “Nora Ephron Collected”

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• The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is sayingit is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

  Nora Ephron

  Father, Believe, Thinking

  Nora Ephron (1984). “Crazy Salad Plus Nine”

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• ...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Hero, Thoughtful, Thinking

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• And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to
  prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
  You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we
  cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Freedom, Passion, Luxury

  Robinson Jeffers, Albert Gelpi (2003). “The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers”, p.154, Stanford University Press

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• The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.

  William Carlos Williams

  Crazy, Lakes, Kentucky

  William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

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• Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

  William Carlos Williams

  Giving, Literature, Matter

  William Carlos Williams (1956). “In the American Grain”, p.216, New Directions Publishing

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• If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

  Ishmael Reed

  Brooklyn Bridge, Bridges, Style

  Ishmael Reed (2013). “Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel”, p.18, Open Road Media

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• I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.

  Ishmael Reed

  Fall, Race, Ideas

  Ishmael Reed (1982). “God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays”, Scholarly Title

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• Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.

  Ishmael Reed

  Loyalty, Education, White

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• Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.

  Ishmael Reed

  Morning, Views, Media

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Perseus Books

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• There is a growing sentiment in America that regular saving should be ignored-that the government will take care of people and give them security when they get beyond a certain age or become old and unable to work, but it must be borne in mind that the people who earn and do save, take care of the government! Were it not for the thrifty and the willing workers, the government would be in a bad way.

  George Matthew Adams

  Government, People, Giving

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• I sincerely hope that the incoming Congress will be alive, as it should be, to the importance of our foreign trade and of encouraging it in every way feasible. The possibility of increasing this trade in the Orient, in the Philippines, and in South America is known to everyone who has given the matter attention.

  William Howard Taft

  Attention, Alive, Matter

  William Howard Taft, David Henry Burton (2004). “The Collected Works of William Howard Taft: Presidential addresses and state papers”

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• Every U.S. citizen owes allegiance to our nation. Some Americans consider that anything less than high treason is allegiance.

  Cullen Hightower

  Citizens, Allegiance, Treason

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• The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

  Joan Didion

  Secret, Mobility, Sake

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.57, Zola Books

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