Quotes About America

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword - two jackets, one that's driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

Hamilton may truly be "the man who made modern America.

In America you can buy bucket-sized cups of coffee in any flavor you like other than coffee-flavor.

The disappearance of class distinctions is, however, far from complete. In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards. There is on this subject a profound and widespread hypocrisy whenever people talk in general terms.

The adventure in popular government has gone on in this country for 150 years. And attended by the new risks of this revolutionary era, it is still the greatest adventure in the world today. And still worth one's faith, and one's courage, and one's perspicacity.

Tobacco was the first of the New World drugs to be widely accepted in the Old World, and the European zest for it played a major role in opening North America to colonization. Contemporary civic mythology of the United States overlooks this role of America as drug supplier to the world.

Once without peer, the United States has fallen to nineteenth in college completion in the OECD, and the gap in completion between higher-income and lower-income students has widened.56 Older Americans are the most educated in the world. Younger Americans, not even close.

The depression we find ourselves in here, and which is causing havoc in America, is allowing people to give weight to that which divides them, rather than to the shared experiences and elements of connection they see mirrored in their fellow man.

I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.

Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway.

I do wish you'd break the careless habit of using the word American as if you had stolen it from the rest of us. Use norteamericano, because we Cubans and Mexicans and Uruguayans, we're also Americans.

What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise.

The Platte!" I gasped. "None other," Leeds said. "That's the sorriest river in America. You've heard all the jokes about the Platte. 'Too thick to drink, too thin to plow.' That's a nothing river.

Why are you so angry? Corporate America has always sucked.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

Of course, I must say that I don't think America is God's gift to anybody--if it is, God's days have got to be numbered. That God these people say they serve--and do serve, in ways that they don't know--has got a very nasty sense of humor. Like you'd beat the shit out of Him, if He was a man. Or: if you were.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reëxamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep. This is not the land of the free; it is only sporadically the home of the brave.

It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.

I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.