Quotes About Americans

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Our advertising and even our arts convey the idea that we [Americans] as a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraint, when the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel.

Republican values - strong families, faith, personal responsibility and freedom, among others - are not unique to specific subsets of the electorate. They are universal values, and it is Republicans' job to remind Americans of that fact.

The question Americans should ask is not whether a candidate is affiliated with a particular faith but rather whether that candidate's faith makes it more likely he or she will support policies that align with their values.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

Les Américains ne sont pas plus violents par nature que n'importe quel autre peuple. Si leur société est aussi mortelle, c'est parce que les armes y sont très largement disponibles.

Americans are experts at denial, a choir whose song could be titled, "Things Like That Don't Happen in This Neighborhood.

Feudal societies don't create great cinema we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who ' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

Good God," he wrote on June 9. "Are the Americans all asleep & tamely giving up their glorious liberties or, are they all turned philosophers, that they don't take immediate vengeance on such miscreants; I am afraid of the latter.

The British were highly skilled counterfeiters, and one of their favorite ways to attack the Americans was by depreciating colonial currency.

We must remind Americans that the promise of opportunity remains unbroken - that every person in this great nation can succeed through hard work, courage and personal responsibility.

Where is the outrage of the Muslim community? Why aren't the imams of every mosque holding press conferences, and inviting the media to tell the American public, 'We are Americans first. Any enemy of America is our enemy. We will work to find, stop, arrest, turn in, and condemn anyone in our community who aspires to radicalize our religion and harm our country'?

More members of Congress must commit to meaningful NSA reform. We need comprehensive strategic oversight by independent government agencies, based on full transparency. We need meaningful rules for minimizing data gathered and stored about Americans, rules that require NSA to delete data to which it should not have access.

as hard as it may be to comprehend today, there was a moment during the early 1970s when bombings were viewed by many Americans as a semilegitimate means of protest. In the minds of others, they amounted to little more than a public nuisance.

Individually the Germans were remarkably like Americans; he thought it curious that both peoples had the eagle for their national emblem. The Germans were the same sort of businesslike go-getters: direct, roughly humorous, and usually reliable and able.

I may have been quicker than most of my colleagues to grasp that the country was fed up with the empty promises and utter dysfunction of Washington. I was sensitive to the fact that many Americans we blithely categorize as working class had lousy jobs, were bouncing between jobs, or worried about losing their jobs, and were brimming with resentment. I didn't dismiss them as racist yahoos.

The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world. (p. 65)

But opinion surveys in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Americans favored health care for everyone. They also were in favor of guaranteed jobs, government help for the poor and homeless, military budget cuts, and taxes on the rich. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were willing to take these bold steps. What

The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn't pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego. We

The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas - when some twisted little geek blew the President's off... and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the Peace Candidate. Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the who structure of government.

Even on the rare occasion when a civilized discussion of religion occurs, it's usually rooted in a single question: do you believe in God? If the answer is "no," the typically petulant comeback is: "Then what do you believe?" Americans get offended when anyone questions their beliefs without stopping to wonder why it's necessary for a person to have beliefs, over and above actual knowledge and experience. Our

Despite the fact that a Supreme Court Justice can be impeached for treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, apparently being delusional doesn't make the cut. Maybe the problem is that 58% of Americans also believe in the devil. I guess it's tough to recognize insanity when you're living in the asylum. But

He correctly predicted that the Americans would not play into Japanese hands by sending a fleet to rescue the Philippines in the first phase of the war, but would take as much time as needed to build up overwhelming naval and air power, and then return by way of a methodical island-hopping campaign.

Even so, the Americans had needed more than a few strokes of good luck. The battle had been a near-run thing, and easily might have gone the other way.