American Life Quotes - Page 3

• Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

  Ross Douthat

  Country, Years, Community

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Countless innocent American lives have been stolen because our politicians have failed in their duty to secure our borders and enforce our laws like they have to be enforced. I have met with many of the great parents who lost their children to sanctuary cities and open borders. So many people, so many, many people. So sad.

  Donald Trump

  Children, Law, Cities

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• I think there are a lot of people who are involved in the Tea Party who have very real and sincere concerns about spending that's out of control or generally philosophically believe that the government should be less involved in certain aspects of American life rather than more involved. And they have every right and obligation as citizens to be involved and engaged in this process.

  Barack Obama

  Real, Party, Believe

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• There was a kind of cultural life in New York that wasn't as solidified as it is now, it wasn't as money-driven. If you look at the size of the successful art galleries compared to the size of galleries now - there was no such thing as the Gagosian Gallery or Pace Gallery. But it was a time when magazines were a vital part of American life, and Esquire gave me a free pass to every world - I could get to the art world, the theater world, the movie world. It allowed you to roam through the cultural life of New York City.

  Robert Benton

  Art, New York, Successful

  Source: classic.esquire.com

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• Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

  John Updike

  Home, Car, Literature

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• Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

  Norman Mailer

  Men, Honor, Littles

  Norman Mailer (1968). “The idol and the octopus: political writings, on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations”

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• The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed.

  Anita Loos

  Years, America, Fake

  Anita Loos (1974). “Kiss Hollywood good-by”, Viking Adult

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• The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group - to say nothing of gay marriage - are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Hate, Gay, Doubt

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• In full accordance with the law - and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives - the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa'ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.

  John O. Brennan

  Order, Law, Government

  "The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy". Remarks by John O. Brennan at the Wilson Center, www.wilsoncenter.org. April 30, 2012.

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• There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Radio, Host, Paranoid

  "Obama on Surveillance; Privacy vs. Security; Valedictorian Breaks Rules". "CNN Newsroom" with Brooke Baldwin, www.cnn.com. June 7, 2013.

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• There are no second acts in American lives.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Life

  The Last Tycoon "Hollywood, etc." (1941)

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• Year by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of ours vacations are essential.

  Ellsworth Huntington

  Vacation, Years, Essentials

  Ellsworth Huntington (2016). “A Chronicle of Aboriginal America: Juvenile History - - American”, p.38, VM eBooks

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• One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

  Henry James

  Country, Civilization, Texture

  'Hawthorne' (1879)

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• American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

  Tony Judt

  Government, Opposites, Degrees

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• The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

  Florence King

  Love, Witty, Figures

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• Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

  Joe Klein

  Dna, Rainbow, Diversity

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• I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Dream, New York

  Off the Page with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. May 9, 2006.

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• It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

  J. Maarten Troost

  Appreciated, Deprivation, Overload

  J. Maarten Troost (2006). “Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu”, p.8, Broadway Books

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• The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life.

  Herbert Hoover

  Religious, Spring, Teaching

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• I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Religion, Atheism

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• One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Practice, Silence

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• The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

  Albert Einstein

  Life And Love, America, Goal

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.5, Broadway Books

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• As a geologist, I love Earth observations, but it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.

  Harrison Schmitt

  Ties, Government, Data

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• The 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities.

  Harrison Schmitt

  Government, Decision, Political

  "Former NASA Advisory Council Chair Jack Schmitt Quits Planetary Society Over New Roadmap". Resignation from Society Letter from Harrison H. Schmitt, www.spaceref.com. November 17, 2008.

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• The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

  Susan Sontag

  Life, Spiritual, Athlete

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