Quotes About America

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

In the 1950s the three most heinous things in America were heroin use, communism, and homosexuality.

America was the attic of French culture.

In America everyone called the merest acquaintance a 'friend' – Guy had taken up the habit. It made him feel better about not having any real friends.

That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could.

Because I had hankered to go back to America, my husband-to-be agreed that we could go there for a year, while the building work was being done.

But people don't fight each other in America.' Said Luke with feeling. 'What do you mean!' His father cried. 'They're always fighting in America. First they fought the English, and then they fought the Indians, and then they fought each other. They're worse than us.

To a foreign eye, America has so much philanthropy and so little charity. Most people have to kill themselves to prove that they deserve ordinary kindness, while a tiny group of people never stop boasting about how generous they are – as long as it's tax-deductible.

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.

Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. "Government money," of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.

Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.

just as America was the first modern land where people could practice freedom of religion, perhaps someday America will be a place where we enjoy freedom from religion, and discover true spirituality through the awakening of our higher brain functions.

It is the threat of the use of force [against Iraq] and our line-up there that is going to put force behind the diplomacy. But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.

It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth--reality is the fastest American commodity.

I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing -- America was nothing if not good intentions.

Ours is the "land of the free"—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.) —Roughing It, 1872, ch. 54 (commenting on mistreatment of Chinese in the West)

Joseph was hardly the first prophet of America's Second Great Awakening—the tide of religious fervor that washed across the country at the start of the nineteenth century—to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn't the last. But he was the most successful.

Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world. (on Russia and America)

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, "I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd want to stop one.

Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?

Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!

Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains.

Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?