America Quotes - Page 30

• What would you call America's most priceless asset? Surely not its limitless natural resources, not its matchless national wealth, not its unequalled store of gold, not its giant factories, not its surpassing railroads, not its unprecedented volume of cheap power. Is not its most priceless asset the character of its people, their indomitable self-confidence, their transcendent vision, their sleepless initiative and, perhaps above all, their inherent, irrepressible optimism?

  B. C. Forbes

  Character, Self Confidence, Optimism

  4 Copy quote

• After visiting several of America's most fashionable playgrounds, I have reached the conclusion that men who work hard enjoy life most. The men at such places can be divided into two classes, first, busy men of affairs ... and, second, rich loafers. I was impressed by the obvious enjoyment corporation heads and other important executives were deriving from their vacation activities.... The idle rich fellows, on the other hand, although indulging in exactly the same activities, palpably were bored.

  B. C. Forbes

  Hard Work, Men, Vacation

  4 Copy quote

• The majority of America's colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them.... Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.

  B. C. Forbes

  Photography, Moving, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.

  B. C. Forbes

  Real, Men, Years

  5 Copy quote

• America, in the eyes of the world, typifies above all else this quality of initiative. The greatest successes are nearly all the fruit of initiative. Why do we hold in such high esteem the achievements of the Wright brothers? Because they were illustrious examples of initiative and tenacity. And ideas are born of initiative, the children of men and women of initiative. Advancement is applied initiative. Don't imitate. Initiate.

  B. C. Forbes

  Brother, Children, Eye

  6 Copy quote

• Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Commitment, Long, Evil

  "The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers" by V. S. Pritchett, (p. 102), 1979.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Multiculturalism is a campaign to lower America's moral status by defining the American experience is terms of myriad repressionsand their victims. By rewriting history, and by using name calling ("Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!") to inhibit debate, multiculturalists cultivate grievances, self pity and claims to entitlements arising from victimization.

  George Will

  Self, Names, Campaigns

  15 Copy quote

• In Ireland, there are the same fossils, the same shells and the same sea bodies, as appear in America, and some of them are found in no other part of Europe.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Europe, Sea, Shells

  Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon (1817). “A Natural History, General and Particular: Containing the History and Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, the Brute Creation, Vegetables, Minerals, Etc. Etc”, p.128

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able. . . . No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the wilful acts and aggressions of others.

  Woodrow Wilson

  War, Mean, Long

  Woodrow Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, James Wilford Garner, Frank D. Garland (1917). “Why We Fight Germany: Being the President's Addresses Relating to the Great War and His Reply to the Pope's Peace Proposal”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Projections are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome, have a subconscious bias, and its apparent precision makes it fallacious. They remind me of Mark Twain's saying, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' Projections in America are often a lie, although not an intentional one, but the worst kind because the forecaster often believes them himself.

  Charlie Munger

  Liars, Lying, Believe

  17 Copy quote

• [D]rawing up 'secret war plans' for a possible attack on Iraq wasn't irrational. The low-level war against Saddam was 12 years old, with no end in sight. American and British pilots were getting shot at, sanctions weren't working, and Bush was getting warnings that Saddam had all those terrible weapons and would use them against America. Bush would have been a fool not to draw up plans. Gee, wait till the critics find out that FDR, without ever informing the media, was plotting to fight Japan and Germany before Pearl Harbor.

  John Leo

  War, Fighting, Japan

  5 Copy quote

• The higher state to which [America] seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Purpose, Favors, Merit

  Presidential Inaugural Address, delivered 4 March 1925

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• America has entered a great struggle that tests our strength, and even more our resolve. Our nation is patient and steadfast. We continue to pursue the terrorists in cities and camps and caves across the earth. We are joined by a great coalition of nations to rid the world of terror. And we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder. Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear, and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power.

  George W. Bush

  War, Struggle, Civilization

  "Sept. 11 Marked as Day of Remembering". abcnews.go.com. September 11.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ninety-eight out of 100 of the rich men in America are honest. That is why they are rich.

  Russell Conwell

  Honesty, Men, Eight

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Friends, Freedom, War

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1967). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966”, p.898, Best Books on

  76 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals--and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am notsure would ever feel this way--some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Real, Self, Achievement

  18 Copy quote

• America, the country of my heart, my second home.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Country, Home, Heart

  4 Copy quote

• I loved your country [America] before I knew it.

  Ignacy Jan Paderewski

  Country, I Loved You

  4 Copy quote

• If I had the opportunity to say a fine word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don't think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right.

  Charles William Eliot

  Reading, Opportunity, Thinking

  18 Copy quote

• Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Country, Class, Common

  W. Somerset Maugham (2011). “A Writer's Notebook”, p.232, Random House

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic--the res- publica--has been settled, it is time to look after the res- privata,--the private state,--to see, as the Roman Senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-PRIVATA detrimenti caperet," that the private state receive no detriment.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Freedom, Tyrants, Political

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.50, David M Gross

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten honest men only,--ay, if one HONESTman, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Names, Abolition Of Slavery

  Henry David Thoreau (1942). “Civil Disobedience”, p.10, Hayes Barton Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Men, Rome

  8 Copy quote

• The black people's struggle has vanquished racism. It was God who created colour. Today Obama, a son of Kenya, a son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.

  Muammar al-Gaddafi

  Struggle, Son, Racism

  "Kadhafi closes AU summit, division over plans for 'United States of Africa'". www1.rfi.fr. February 4, 2009.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• We believe America is practicing all kinds of terrorism against Libya. Even the accusation that we are involved in terrorism is in itself an act of terrorism.

  Muammar al-Gaddafi

  Believe, Kind, Terrorism

  TIME Interview, content.time.com. June 8, 1981.

  169 Copy quote

  Show source