American Quotes - page 2

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings. (George Will)
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday... The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. View quote
Ayn Rand
The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been. View quote
George F. Kennan
When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high. View quote
Hideki Tōjō
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes. View quote
Gore Vidal
The United States brags about its political system, but the [American] President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves. View quote
Deng Xiaoping
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe. View quote
Henry James
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. (Henry James)
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. View quote
Henry James
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. View quote
Henry James
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. View quote
W. H. Auden
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. View quote
Zelda Fitzgerald
We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy. View quote
Henry Miller
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them. View quote
Neil Gaiman
If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children. View quote
Coretta Scott King
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left. View quote
Orson Welles
This is the worst President ever. He George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history. (Helen Thomas)
If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience. View quote
Tallulah Bankhead
The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. View quote
Mary McCarthy
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard. View quote
Mary McCarthy