Quotes About America

The students and their parents had cheered, many of them waving American flags of their own. I thought about the country I'd just described to them—a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an America that was open to everyone. At about the same age as the graduates were now, I'd seized on that idea and clung to it for dear life. For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian.

about 40 percent of America's unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas.

She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America," I said. "They're not famous. Their names aren't in the newspapers. But each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren. They aren't seeking the limelight—all they try to do is just do the right thing.

weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America's voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"—that was my America.

I recognize that there are those who believe that it's time to discard the myth—that an examination of America's past and an even cursory glance at today's headlines show that this nation's ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.

You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing 'a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet' and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.

The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.' But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.

I hear America singing! Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs!

But given the many shapes and forms the back door could take, she was pretty sure he'd already been through a couple of them, whether he knew it or not. Was it even possible to grow up a poor black man in America and avoid the back door?

War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He

It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America's oil addiction is a sickness that's killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.

We are studying sensible ways to amend our own constitution in India. And we often joke that perhaps you Americans could lend us yours, because you seem no longer to be using it yourselves.

I am a dragon. America the beautiful, like you will never know.

The Statue of Liberty wears size 879 shoes!

It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.

Tim stared at the steel rod in the gloved hand. Is that a magic wand? The Covenant Man appeared to consider. I suppose so. Although it started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart, America's economy car, young Tim. What's America? A kingdom filled with toy-loving idiots. It has no part in our palaver.

In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.

Whatever doubts the Americans had about the wisdom of embracing Zia were overwhelmed by their determination to intensify the rebellion in Afghanistan.

One of the most immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of empires and great nations. Some Americans, however, believe their country to be so far beyond comparison with any other country or empire that has ever existed that it has passed beyond the reach of history.

Americans have always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure motives