Quotes About America

Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.

Suddenly Paris fashion-that bellwether for the French mind-had to be à l'Amérique: tailors manufactured insurgent coats and lightning-conductor dresses (in honor of Ben Franklin, with two wires hanging to the ground).

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've found something. What is it that you've found? Hitchhiking.

If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. ? Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Street Crime is the only logical response to America's drug policy just as terrorism is the only logical response to America's foreign policy

Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

The complexity of the so-called individual that's been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the 'me'. When I was a young girl we were called citizens – American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did – consume. Now they don't use those words any more – it's the American taxpayer and those are different attitudes.

White but European which was not as bad as white and American;

Our founding fathers' failure to apply the principles of freedom that they were espousing to the area of race is a prominent reason why many minority individuals today are less than enthusiastic to join in with those in our nation who want to exalt or restore America's history and heritage. God's kingdom does

The problem with race in America is not fundamentally a problem of skin. It is a problem of sin. It is a problem in that people have not been willing to address the sin that has led to a division among skin as we hold tenaciously to our cultures. Our backgrounds and preferences are legitimate, but when they overrule God, that's when Jesus says, "You are wrong.

In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila

Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and vegetable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. "We want to see the history and beauty of America," Daijiro explained.

fewer still in America continue to believe in what was once thought of as a 'public service mission': the duty to provide certain sorts of goods and services just because they are in the public interest.

But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer: 'America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe'.

Compliments in America can take an almost aggressive form, as if the speaker needs to defend her own shortcomings rather that simply to rejoice in another's ability.

It is a sign of how thoroughly the Reconstruction Constitution has displaced the Founders' Constitution that these are the cases that define our constitutional order. We are not Founding America, and we are not the heirs of that first Republic, either. We are the heirs of the people who destroyed it. We are Reconstruction America.

Only a very bold country would mix vodka and clams. The cocktail, also known as the Bloody Caesar, was invented in 1969 by Canadian hero Walter Chell, who crushed fresh clams into tomato juice and added plenty of vodka. Americans can now take the easy route by buying Clamato off the shelf.

I think there is a puritanical wind that is blowing. I have never seen such a lack of separation between church and state in America, I don't believe in God, but if I did I would say that sex is a Godgiven right. Otherwise it's the end of our species.

I like American history.

As American as an apple is and as American as baseball is, they don't go together. You can't be chewing an apple at a baseball game. You've got to let go of the diet that day.

THE ORIGINAL PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, much like the Constitution itself, did not acknowledge the existence of God. Its author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister from Rome, New York, was a decidedly religious man, but when he wrote the pledge in the 1890s he described himself as something that would seem an oxymoron in Eisenhower's America: a "Christian socialist.

On its final page, the noted painter Arnold Friberg depicted Moses, his arms outstretched, with the Liberty Bell ringing behind him. Across the top of the page ran the same passage from Leviticus used earlier by Spiritual Mobilization: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.