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Quotes About America

Because of the city upon a hill sound bite, A Model of Christian Charity is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.
~ Sarah Vowell
In America, on the ordinate plane of faith versus reason, the x-axis of faith intersects with the y-axis of reason at the zero point of I don't give a damn what you think.
~ Sarah Vowell
The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.
~ Sarah Vowell
I swear on Peter Stuyvesant's peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston's communitarian English majors.
~ Sarah Vowell
I have intimate knowledge of what it was like to be young and uneasy and outraged under Reagan. My high school was 1980s America in miniature--you either belonged or you didn't, you learned to seek relief where you could find it.
~ Sarah Vowell
The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle's dream.)
~ Sarah Vowell
For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns.
~ Sarah Vowell
French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.
~ Sarah Vowell
I see plainly that America can defend herself if proper measures are taken," he wrote, adding ominously, "and now I begin to fear she should be lost by herself and her own sons." The
~ Sarah Vowell
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
~ Saul Bellow
There's the most extraordinary, unheard of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it...the agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way.
~ Saul Bellow
What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.
~ Saul Bellow
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
~ Saul Bellow
Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
~ Saul Bellow
Why is it that Alsop is writing such a letter, warning Israel that it stands in danger of destruction and reminding it that it has only one protector? It is because "bad trouble has begun between Israel and America." For one thing, Alsop is shocked by Israel's ingratitude to Secretary of State Kissinger.
~ Saul Bellow
When the Hungarians were condemned to die alone, the hopes and faith of millions of the world's most dedicated anti-communists died with them. Our staunchest allies, the enslaved people behind the Iron Curtain now believe they cannot expect help from America. If Americans lose their freedom, the beginning of the end came in Hungary.
~ John A. Stormer
Yesterday, the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States."
~ John Adams
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
~ John Adams
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
~ John Adams
Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.
~ John Ashcroft
America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks.
~ John Barrymore
It is deeply ironic that while America was hemming and hawing over whether to go metric on account of its shrinking place in world trade, a U.S. innovation sized in customary feet was becoming the most important measure of capacity ever to hit the global market.
~ John Bemelmans Marciano
Authenticity was tricky; trying to duplicate another country's food in America was impossible. Wasn't it better to adapt a cuisine, as he'd begun to do in Fireside with French cuisine bourgeoise? To give it an American identity and make it something new?
~ John Birdsall
The best and most interesting food in America was inseparable from the landscapes that produced it. It was all right there, in country diners and small-town grocers' shops; in roadside dinner houses and bakeries. All you needed to do was look.
~ John Birdsall