AMERICA QUOTES V
quotations about America
Americans are always moving on.
It's an old Spanish custom gone astray,
A sort of English fever, I believe,
Or just a mere desire to take French leave,
I couldn't say. I couldn't really say.
But, when the whistle blows, they go away.
Sometimes there never was a whistle blown,
But they don't care, for they can blow their own
Whistles of willow-stick and rabbit-bone,
Quail-calling through the rain
A dozen tunes but only one refrain,
"We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
prelude, Western Star
Each time Donald Trump says he will make America great again, he's declaring without actually declaring out loud two very unAmerican things. One: America now stinks. Two: America was great when WASP white men were in charge before that black guy took over and women in sports jackets got involved. How not-great is it to bring that plate of hate to our table of thought?
LINDA STASI
"America is much greater than the GOP makes it seem", New York Daily News, March 8, 2016
America can restore its strengths as the world-respected land of opportunity by returning to open-society principles. An open society invests in people and new ideas, rewards talent and hard work, values dialogue and learns from dissent, operates to high standards with transparent information, looks for common ground, sees problems as opportunities for creative change, and encourages those who are fortunate to help others get the same chance, because service is the highest ideal. With such standards in mind, America the Beautiful can return to its admired role as America the Principled.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
America the Principled
There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT
The Arrogance of Power
A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road--after all, that's where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast. It's also full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to notice from the ground (and difficult to pick out from six miles up in an airliner): quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identifiable by their fencing (though some mega high schools can look similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked in locations where normal traffic won't pass by. I never tire of the view from this height, as different from the normal, grim airliner perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship.
JAMES FALLOWS
"How America Is Putting Itself Back Together", The Atlantic, March 2016
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in this world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1953
The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed -- selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful -- we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic -- and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
You look out right now at the presidential contests and the startling, dismaying probabilities, and it's hard not to wonder if something dramatically wrong isn't happening to America. It is. Too many things are falling apart. Trust has disappeared. The white working class is in agony. Family dissolution is a fact of life. The economy is poking along. The debt is racing along. And now we have a political reality show.
JAY AMBROSE
"Much of America is falling apart", Ventura County Star, March 4, 2016
In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
We should keep steadily before our minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; that it is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
speech at the unveiling of the monument to General Sheridan, Nov. 25, 1908
Donald Trump marched into the political scene last year and claimed he is going to "Make America Great Again." The theme revolves around one question: who is the real American? In other words, Trump is trying to draw a clear line between his supposed rightful Americans -- who deserve proper access to the Bill of Rights -- and the unfavorable cast-offs of American society. Trump's idea of a great America is to cut off and reject those he deems unfit. It seems to be ridiculous, but just ridiculous enough to hit a sweet spot with an increasingly ridiculous voting populace.
PHOEBE KUO
"Trump's Vision of America is Founded on Exclusion", NYU News, March 8, 2016
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
RINGO STARR
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Great British Humor
But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated--free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.
FAREED ZAKARIA
The Post-American World: Release 2.0
I know this about the American people: We welcome competition. We'll match our ingenuity, our energy, our experience and technology, our spirit and enterprise against anyone.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
State of the Union Address, Jan. 31, 1990
The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the "in between." They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind--a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future.
SAUL ALINSKY
Reveille for Radicals
America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The Paris Review, spring/summer 1957
No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
First Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789
America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life -- a life that should be new in freedom.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Third Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1941