Quotes About America

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

We really are 15 countries, and it's really remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham -- both are certain they are the real American.

They all hated Ronald Reagan with a uniform loathing, and it astonished Jules Jacobson that other people in America – a majority, apparently – actually liked him. Nixon had been an outright grotesque, and as far as she could see Reagan was one too, with his oiled hair and padded shoulders like some dunderheaded uncle.

Here in Rome, "men live for something else beside money and systems, the voice of noble sentiment is understood." She had found in Italy "a sphere much more natural to me than what the old puritans or the modern bankers have made" in America, the now stagnant and degraded "new" world.

In no country is it more important to cultivate good manners, than in our own," Eliza Farrar wrote, "where we acknowledge no distinctions but what are founded on character and manners." America's

As Margaret would later write, Europe had come to seem "my America," an unsettled territory where liberty was at hand, while the New World she had left behind had grown "stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war," the imperialist conflict with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.

One does not have to be Christian to see that [John] Donne was right. To be ill is to recognize this interconnectedness -- to understand how much we are "a part of the main." But to be ill in America today is to be brought up against the pathology of a culture that denies this fact. In the worst moments of my illness, I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than the community, must do all the healing.

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them.

In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly: The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available... in America right now.

Cruz may not be everyone's favorite drinking buddy but America needs a designated driver and by God, Cruz will take America to a safe harbor.

The transformation of America that took place during the post-World War II period really began a decade earlier, with the completion of Hoover Dam. The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era.

In America, though, where less than half of a percent of the population volunteers for the armed forces, the gap between the military and civilian cultures can be glaring.

The notion of the need to revise America's global role, to palliate Islam, and achieve diplomatic distance from Israel had become conventional by the time I arrived in Washington.

The central miscalculation of the Religious Right has been its failure to recognize the real nature of the battle, how long it's been waged, and the high price we've been willing to pay for entry into the political theater. I write as an evangelical Christian who once believed that America is a Christian nation that lost its way. I'm still an evangelical Christian, but I no longer believe that this nation, or any nation in this fallen world, can truly be 'under God.

After a year in America, Amiri changed his mind and decided to go back to Iran. He supposedly couldn't cope with the stress of his new life.

Leading from the front: Its what built America. But these days, the federal government isnt at the front its cowering in the back corner of the room, ducking responsibility and hoping no one notices.

There is no business in America that would be prevented from taking results into account when making personnel decisions.

What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you're going to have enormous impact on America, that's a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.

January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out.

In their attempts to date Zen Buddhism's official debut in America, many historians follow the lead of Rick Fields and cite the significance of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago; others point to the subsequent arrival of a particular teacher. The undisputed fact is that it was not here until the twentieth century, and it was not able to flourish until a monastery was established at Tassajara in 1967.

Thanksgiving is America's national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty.

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action.