Quotes About America

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at.

The average IQ in America is - and this can be proven mathematically - average.

The Kelley fight meant that much because it's always when a fighter from this country goes over to America and proves himself, it's always make or break in a British fighter's career.

Our system of private health insurance that fails to provide coverage to so many of our citizens also contributes to the double-digit health care inflation that is making America less competitive in the global economy.

The Missouri of his childhood was theoretically the inspiration for Main Street, U.S.A., though only in its halcyon summer vacation months and stripped of any dismal memories: no blizzards, no doctor's office, and no school-house. Almost no one has a dismal experience in Walt Disney's America, as a matter of fact, at least not that Walt noticed.

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the Harvard manner of about 1900.

Acho que todo mundo na América, exceto umas mil pessoas escolhidas, deveria ser obrigado a aceitar um código moral super-rígido: o catolicismo romano, por exemplo. Não me queixo da moralidade convencional. Pelo contrário, reclamo dos heréticos medíocres que roubam os frutos da sofisticação e adotam uma pose de liberalidade moral a que suas inteligências não fazem jus.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land.

In her opinion, Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Birdseye are the two greatest Americans that ever lived excluding Robert E. Lee. She believes we never lost the War Between the States, that General Lee thought General Grant was the butler and just naturally handed him his sword.

Eighty years ago, Woodrow Wilson took America into the twentieth century with a challenge to make the world safe for democracy. As we enter the twenty-first century, our task is to make democracy safe for the world.

America's problems—from ineffective government to patchy health care to vicious polarization.

The real test for the United States is political—and it rests not just with America at large but with Washington in particular.

One in every three pills taken by Americans, for example, are generics produced in India, which itself gets two-thirds of pharmaceutical ingredients from China.

For many decades, the world needed to learn from America. But now America needs to learn from the world. And what it most needs to learn about is government—not big or small but good government.

America is a messy, ragged, unequal country with dramatic strengths and weaknesses. It could be better governed and more equitable, but it remains incredibly strong, at least as measured by traditional metrics of power. What has shifted noticeably in recent years is America's "soft power"—often defined as its appeal, example, and capacity to set the agenda.

America is, in its DNA, an anti-statist country. The Right comes at it by defunding government. The Left does it by encumbering it with so many rules and requirements that it has a similar dysfunctional effect. As the political theorist Samuel Huntington once explained, power in America is not divided, as is often said, but rather shared and contested, so that you need broad agreement and compromise to get anything done.

Between 1947 and 1989, when America was on the one hand building up the liberal international order, it attempted regime change around the world seventy-two times, by one scholar's count, almost every time without UN approval.

never really experiencing the true costs of its mistakes—until now. America is successful enough never to collapse, but it could slowly edge downward

America needs to learn from the world. And what it most needs to learn about is government—not big or small but good government.

That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China's expansionism but America's abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation.

To make it in boxing, you must captivate the fans in America, too.