Quotes About America

the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that's why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.

Looking back, it's easy to see the clothes as a metaphor for everything else that happened to women in postwar America.

The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.

America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.

so I looked at this kid from West Texas, feelin' all cut up an' betrayed 'cause he suddenly realized the Land of the Free been fuckin' him in the ass all his life--an' I told myself, 'Shit, so that's what it's like to be the white boy. Any nigga you ask can tell you that's how America works.

If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk.

Big-government proponents embrace both the power of the federal government and the idea that millions of Americans ought to be dependent on its largesse. It's time to return to our Founders' love for small government. More is not always better.

campaign: a child spawned in the lost America of love drapes himself in the trappings of a gentleman to sell himself to the world.

In the United States, the demand for well-constructed mixed drinks grew steadily during the latter half of the nineteenth century until, in the 1890s, the Golden Age of Cocktails arrived. It would last right up to the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but don't think for a moment that every bar in America was serving masterfully mixed drinks.

The majority of the drinks popular at the turn of the nineteenth century were, by and large, sweeter than they would become over the next twenty years. Something else happened, though, in the last decades of the 1800s. Something momentous. Something that left us with a range of drinks that must now be considered the capos of the cocktail family: Vermouth became popular among the cocktailian bartenders of America.

By the time the 1940s arrived, Americans had been introduced to the Bloody Mary. Vodka was being made in the States, though not many people knew much about it until around the middle of the decade, when Jack Morgan, the owner of the Cock and Bull Tavern in Los Angeles and an executive from the company that was making Smirnoff vodka, got together to create the Moscow Mule. Vodka would never look back.

One practice that faded from fashion about a hundred years ago is the custom of topping drinks, especially those made with crushed ice, with mounds of berries and small slices of other fruits, such as strawberries and bananas. In the days when these drinks were served at first-class bars, the customers were provided with short spoons with which to eat the fruit—it's a practice I'd love to see return to the barrooms of America.

There's a message I want to deliver in this book: I love my country and I'm grateful to be an American. I know where my freedom comes from, and I do not take for granted the sacrifices of those who provide it. Because of that, I want to do all I can to ensure America's defenders and their families are never forgotten.

My aim here is to put a human face—a child's face—on the "collateral damage" of gun violence in America.

in the last two years alone, more Americans died from gunshot wounds than were killed during the entire Vietnam War. By contrast, in all of Japan (with a population of 120 million people), the number of young men shot to death in a year is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single busy weekend.

Always America seemed too big, too vast, too remote and too American. I remember the night we heard about the number one position in Cashbox I said to John Lennon 'There can be nothing more important than this,' adding a tentative 'Can there?

The Barbary states were already at war with America, and they seemed to understand only one kind of diplomacy—the kind that was accompanied by a cannon.

America's newfound prestige was not blinded by its own power; might and mercy could work in harmony. On

I think technology has changed America, not any one organization. Technology is taking the power away from the few. There'll be a lot more choices, and good people who are doing serious stuff will survive and there'll be a lot more voices, and that is very healthy.

In a very short time, a few days at most, America disappears. Its streets and cities drift and fade away; they are replaced by orchards and date groves and the Tigris, by an Iraqi countryside in a time of violence.

Substitute "Hillbilly" for "Blues" and this regionally inflected nostalgia remains much the same. Bear down on the word "real" in Paramount's advertising copy, and it is possible to see how recorded roots music, with its claims to authenticity, could help counter a sense of social and cultural dislocation, a deep anxiety about the increasing superficiality and transitory nature of a modern America characterized by disconcerting changes.

Charles, on the other hand, was full faced and unshaven and looked overstuffed in his enormous sweatshirt. His oversized sweatshirts always had outsized political messages on them. Today he wore a black sweatshirt. Its message, in large white block letters, read i'm 1776% sure i'm keeping all my guns'.

But I didn't say this to my aunt. Instead, I said, "America is number one." This had been the campaign slogan of the man who would eventually become our president. Charles Otis, my old classmate and neighbor, was one of his supporters and had taken to wearing a red mesh baseball hat with that slogan on its face, although on Charles's hat the symbol was on the wrong side of the number: AMERICA IS 1#.

The Founding Fathers] were not advocates for a monolithic notion of "God and Country," as promoters of a Christian America would now have us believe. They were precisely the opposite: the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious right.