America Quotes - Page 4

I love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

America and its demons Europe and its ghosts.

Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp.

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

My father once told me that American democracy is a people’s democracy at heart, and that it therefore can be as great as the American people, or as fallible. It depends on all of us. But our system is more fragile than we know. To sustain it, we must always cherish the ideals on which it was founded, remain vigilant against the dark forces that threaten it, and actively engage in the process of making it work.

Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson had imagined the American experiment coming to all sorts of bad ends. They never imagined the Federal City overrun by frontiersmen who cared nothing for history and loved only cheap land and credit, whiskey, tobacco, guns, fast women, fast horses, and Jesus. Not necessarily in that order.

History is the archaeology of the present and future.

They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.

Only in America can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war, pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines, and still call yourself 'pro-life.

Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again.

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.I read it every week.Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s seriousbut me.

This is the opposite of the free market.

Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option to leave. I am allowed to see the ocean.

Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity...On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

Prosperity is always built on slave labor. Ask any Ameri-can't. Or Bulgari-can. Yes, we can, eat from a trash can...

O America, I am your Liberty, and you are that huddled mass yearning to breathe free. I am your Lighthouse, the One beaconing [yea, beckoning], and you are that wayfarer—strayed, grayed, and frayed … Now, return, you tempest-tost; lift up your gaze to the lighted torch aloft the golden door and come home.

The American political system is like fast food--mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things...and everybody wants some.

[Freud] "sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.” Ragtime

Because even though you're dating five other women, I think I'm cheating on you.

America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.

Can you imagine the reaction of a British tabloid newspaper if they found a small school in rural England hosting a party like this? A party? In a school? With children present? Where marijuana is openly smoked? And comdoms are given away at the door?Imagine the headlines! How much would the Daily Mail hate this? How much would the Daily Mail love to hate this?!

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced.

White men have screwed this country up! I would like a black, female…. everything all rolled into one.I want something different. I want a real change. People, I want a president who speaks well, who has a sense of humor. This guy is such a moron! It's beyond the point where it's a joke. He's an idiot.

America Is a Time to think about where you think and where you believe in what you got to live for in life

American diversity rarely applies to money and success.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...

America this is quite serious

Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.

Koch believed that what the famed economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" was so critical to the health of the capitalist system that empathy was an obstacle to acceptance of the world that must be brought into being.

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions

The swaggering underemphasis of New England.

What I find disturbing in America is the consuming desire for leisure, convenience, and fun. It seems we, as a nation, have traded God for gadgets. We have traded eternal truth for momentary self-gratification—worshipping false gods of materialism and humanism instead of the Creator of all things.

What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.

Good Americans when they die go to Paris.

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.

The gaping wound in America’s national security is without a doubt, the unregulated dragnet surveillance capitalists.

they're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her.

We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.

America is a young dumb country and it needs all kinds of help. America is a dumb puppy with big teeth that bite and hurt. And we take care of America. We hold America to our bosom; we feed America, we make love to America. There wouldn't be an America if it wasn't for black people. So you have some dedicated black Americans who will die a million deaths to save America. And this is home for us. We don't know really about Africa. We talk it in a romantic sense, but America is it. And so, America is always going to be okay as long as black people don't totally lose their mind, cause we'll pick up the pieces and turn it into a new dance.

I can remember whendelusions of grandeur entailed wanting tobe a rock star, movie star,a millionaire; to make itas a writer—now it seems that it’sto want to earn adecent living

America's foundational philosophy is what sets her apart from the troubles and tribulations of the other nations around the globe. If we continue to move away from a biblical foundation, we will find ourselves facing troubles we will be ill equipped to overcome.

The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see.

Princes always are always happy to see developing among their subjects the taste for agreeable arts and for superfluities which do not result in the export of money. For quite apart from the fact that with these they nourish that spiritual pettiness so appropriate for servitude, they know very well that all the needs which people give themselves are so many chains binding them. When Alexander wished to keep the Ichthyophagi dependent on him, he forced them to abandon fishing and to nourish themselves on foods common to other people. And no one has been able to subjugate the savages in America, who go around quite naked and live only from what their hunting provides. In fact, what yoke could be imposed on men who have no need of anything?

Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.

I consider myself an American African because we did not come by choice.

Liberia gave life, America gives me a DREAM.

It’s just another notch in the good ol’ fucked up, modern America belt.

She must have been debating staying in the line or forcing me to run home and change.

Thou too sail on O Shipof State! Sail on O Union strong and great! Humanity with all its fears With all the hopes of future years Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean

the greatest Americanshave not been born yetthey are waiting patientlyfor the past to die

Every man, woman, and child on this earth is a wandering pilgrim in his or her own way—each searching for a belonging place. That sense of belonging is found only as we care for one another.

I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.