AMERICA QUOTES III
quotations about America
The English Constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good; the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
MARTIN AMIS
"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988", Visiting Mr. Nabokov and Other Excursions
The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"New England Two Centuries Ago", The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose
I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. The turkey is a much more respectable bird.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
letter to Sarah Bache, Jan. 26, 1784
Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles.
TOM ROBBINS
Another Roadside Attraction
This is America and I'll make as much noise as I want so just shut your own mouth.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
"American Names"
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people -- women as well as men.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
speech after her arrest for voting in the 1872 presidential election
We speak with pride and admiration of that little band of Americans who overcame insuperable odds to set this nation on course 200 years ago. But our glory didn't end with them. Americans ever since have emulated their deeds.
RONALD REAGAN
State of the Union address, Jan. 26, 1982
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Swimmers", Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 19, 1929
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL
Screening History
I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Case Against Roots", America and Cosmic Man
To be black in America is to walk with fury.
NATHAN MCCALL
To Be Black in America Is to Walk with Fury
American's greatest deficit is no longer found in the federal budget. It is a moral deficit, and it may be found in a polluted and poisoned culture that has become the great enemy within.
PAT BUCHANAN
speech, Mar. 2, 1999
It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State -- ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios -- burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man ... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box -- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.
CHRIS ABANI
"Chris Abani on the stories of Africa", TED conference
America has seen tough times before. We've always known how to get through them. And we've always believed our best days are ahead of us. I believe that still. But we must rise to the occasion, as we always have; change what must be changed; and make the future better than the past.
JOHN MCCAIN
speech, Jun. 3, 2008
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
JOHN ADAMS
Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, Boston Gazette, Aug. 1765
Some of us grew up in households, for example, hearing that America is always right and never makes a mistake in the world. Others of us grew up in families that were so critical of America that the country was always described as a bully or an oppressor. In both cases, if we want to grow up to be free, we will have to unlearn the simple half-truths we were taught and develop the discernment to decide for ourselves when America's actions at home and abroad are virtuous--and when they are not. Always praising America is not patriotism. It is idolatry. But always criticizing America is not patriotism, either. It is ingratitude. The former is blind to America's faults; the latter is blind to America's virtues.
MARK GERZON
The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide