American West Quotes

• I don't even listen to rap. My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.

  Kanye West

  Nice, Rap, Baffled

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.

  N. Scott Momaday

  West, Landscape

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• The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Future, Greatness, Yesterday

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• I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

  Ang Lee

  Drama, Thinking, Romantic Love

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• The chief contribution made by white men of the Americas to the folk songs of the world ——- the cowboy songs of Texas and the West ——- are rhythmed to the walk, the trot, and the gallop of horses.

  J. Frank Dobie

  Song, Horse, Cowboy

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• The preservation of parks, wilderness, and wildlife has also aided liberty by keeping alive the 19th century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West. Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destructive trespass of pollution. In our own time, the nearly universal appreciation of these preserved landscapes, restored waters, and cleaner air through outdoor recreation is a modern expression of our freedom and leisure to enjoy the wonderful life that generations past have built for us.

  Ronald Reagan

  Appreciation, Adventure, Past

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• The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

  Edward Abbey

  Rain, Fire, Light

  Edward Abbey (1988). “Desert Solitaire”, p.13, University of Arizona Press

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• A man from Iowa or Illinois will say 'I'm from the Middle West'..a Georgian or a Mississipian may admit to being merely a Southerner...but no Texan, given the opportunity, ever said otherwise than 'I'm from Texas'.

  J. Frank Dobie

  Opportunity, Men, Illinois

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• There are certain things we can only do together. There are certain things only a union can do. Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American west, which is why President Abraham Lincoln passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy.

  Barack Obama

  Land, Giving, Presidential

  "Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull", www.cnn.com. February 12, 2009.

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• What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

  Peter Diamandis

  Real, Oil, Gold

  "Big Think Interview With Peter Diamandis". Interview with Paul Hoffman, bigthink.com. January 26, 2010.

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• The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies - drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

  Al Gore

  Drinking, Fire, Water

  "Gore talks climate change, jobs in an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell". www.nbcnews.com. December 9, 2009.

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• During 1866 and 1922, Native Americans and black soldiers often intermingled in the American west, on the frontier.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Basketball, Native American, Soldier

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• I think we have powerful role-models among us in the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about that.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Powerful, Mean, Thinking

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Lakes, Government, Democracy

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

  Galen Rowell

  Photography, People, East

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• The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

  Edward Abbey

  Cowboy, Revolution, Getting Laid

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.54, RosettaBooks

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• I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.

  Ian Frazier

  Beautiful, Art, Want

  Ian Frazier (2000). “On the Rez”, p.4, Macmillan

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• I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Country, Struggle, Writing

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• For decades, people have known the chemical-propulsion approach to space travel is really not going to get us that far. Chemical propulsion is essentially like the horse-and-cart approach to the exploration of the American West, instead of the steamboat or the railroad.

  Franklin Chang Diaz

  Horse, Future, Space

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• Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east. But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre – they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre.

  Craig Thompson

  Fun, Thinking, Cowboy

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• Although I agree that wild horses are a symbol of the American West, I also believe that it is the responsibility of Congress to ensure that these animals are managed, protected, and controlled in an effective manner.

  Jon Porter

  Horse, Believe, Responsibility

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• To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it.

  Thomas McGuane

  Spiritual, Distance, Views

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• I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

  Edward Abbey

  New York, Heart, Virginia

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.30, RosettaBooks

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• I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

  Tracy Chevalier

  Children, Book, Writing

  "Tracy Chevalier: 'Slavery has to be raised until it's put to bed'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. March 16, 2013.

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