Quotes About America

Little things about the Pilgrims surprised me. For instance, the fact that the first duel in America was fought at Plymouth by two teenaged boys over a girl. The life the Pilgrims led in Holland before coming to America also surprised me.

First of all, the world criticizes American foreign policy because Americans criticize American foreign policy. We shouldn't be surprised about that. Criticizing government is a God-given right - at least in democracies.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

When I began we did not really have a lot of First Amendment law. It is really surprising to think of it this way, but a lot of the law - most of the law that relates to the First Amendment freedom of the press in America - is really within living memory.

I remember 'The Shepherd's Dog' record being not necessarily a political record, but a reaction to socio-political situations in America. And it didn't manifest itself as protest or propaganda songs, but there's a lot of surreal imagery that was born out of really me being surprised Bush got re-elected in '04.

White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama, they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.

We are so beaten down by political correctness that most of us are numb to the surrender of America.

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.

In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T. M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters.

The key to the future for blacks is a commitment to America and its ideals of freedom, personal responsibility, the free enterprise system, and moral principles.

The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.

Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America's national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.

This is where Mr. Zemurray made the calls," she told me. "He sat in a chair right here, calling every leader in Central and South America, talking and explaining until he got enough of them to change their vote to make modern Israel a reality.

Others, having started by extending credit to customers, evolved into America's first investment banks. Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry Lehman, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, began as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1844. Lazard Frères, founded by three Jewish brothers from France, began as a wholesale business in New Orleans in 1848.

in this day of limited legalized murder, germ warfare in Egypt and South America, and the notorious have-one-kill-one Nevada abortion law.

Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.863

It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

I guess the last remaining question is: What about the sombrero? It's still there, lying in the street but its temperature had returned to -24 degrees and fortunately for America it stayed there. Millions of tourists have walked all around it but not one of them has seen it, though it is in plain sight. How can you miss a very cold white sombrero lying in the Main Street of a town? In other words: There is more to life than meets the eye.

Voluntary Quicksand I read the Chronicle this morning as if I were stepping into voluntary quicksand and watched the news go over my shoes with forty-four more days of spring. Kent State America May 7, 1970

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.

Their future was America and three long years of searching and a process of gradual character disintegration and a slow retreat from respectability and self-pride. In three years they would become what they had always despised.

I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window. There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines. (from The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren, page 47)

The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified. Whether or not it is right to embrace the paradox and blame the secular constitution that they devised, the founders most certainly were secularists who believed in keeping religion out of politics, and that is enough to place them firmly on the side of those who object, for example, to ostentatious displays of the Ten Commandments in government-owned public places.