america Quotes

“In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”

“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it’s privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it’s humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?”

America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.

“The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.”

“As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.”

“First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.”

“Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”

“To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. He was habitually deficient in the sense of political power that the American possesses (and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Scandinavian, and the Swiss). He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State.”

“The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.”

“To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and doing better; to seek the reason of things for one’s self, and in one’s self alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to aim at the substance through the form;—such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans.”

“It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society. In the United States religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force.”

“The American institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives directly, and for the most part annually, in order to ensure their dependence. The people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society.”

“Men are no longer bound together by ideas, but by interests; and it would seem as if human opinions were reduced to a sort of intellectual dust, scattered on every side, unable to collect, unable to cohere.”

“In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing.”

“It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.”

“We shall see hereafter that in America the real strength of the country is vested in the provincial far more than in the Federal Government.”

“The absence of a central government will not, then, as has often been asserted, prove the destruction of the republics of the New World; far from supposing that the American governments are not sufficiently centralized, I shall prove hereafter that they are too much so.”

“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.”

“For me America was a place to bury memories. For Baba a place to mourn his.”

“I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don’t wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.”

“With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.”

“You don’t eat before your troops eat, and you don’t ask your troops to do anything you won’t do, too.”

“I know that we will be judged in history by not only how we disrupt terrorism but how we protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, even Americans who don’t wish us well. We must do all these things exceptionally well.”

“If I have the honor of being confirmed by the Senate, I will make it my highest priority to restore the public’s confidence in the FBI and to re-earn the faith and trust of the American people.”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal responsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

“America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation to ever exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization.”

“The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”

“‘Attitudes aren’t so different in America,’ I told Francis. ‘You are probably right,’ he said. ‘But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.’”

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.”

It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.

There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

″‘I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?‘”

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

“My mother believed you could be anything you wanted in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.”

“In America the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.”

“This is not a good country for gods.”

“Compared with most other places in the developed world, America is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third o the landscape of the lower forty-eight states is covered in trees. ”

“And hunting, remember, had been my life. I have heard that in America businessmen often go to pieces when they give up the business that has been their life.”

“Every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.”

“America was to be the great experiment.”

“Immigration is by definition a gesture of faith in social mobility. It is the expression in action of a positive belief in the possibility of a better life. It has thus contributed greatly to developing the spirit of personal betterment in American society and to strengthening the national confidence in change and the future.”

“The search for freedom of worship has brought people to America from the days of the Pilgrims to modern times.”

“In sum, then, we can see that as each new wave of immigration has reached America it has been faced with problems, not only the problems that come with making new homes and learning new jobs, but, more important, the problems of getting along with people of different backgrounds and habits.”

“Since 1607, when the first English settlers reached the New World, over 42 million people have migrated to the United States.”

“Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. The people who have come to this country have made America, in the words of one perceptive writer, ‘a heterogeneous race but a homogeneous nation.’ ”

“The opportunities that America offered made the dream real, at least for a good many; but the dream itself was in large part the product of millions of plain people beginning a new life in the conviction that life could indeed be better, and each new wave of immigration rekindled that dream.”

“America’s best were going to war, and Sergeant Matt Eversmann was among them.”

“Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?”

“You do not live in America. No such place exists.”

“America’s not really a melting pot. It’s more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies.”

“America allowed them to create a life they couldn’t have dreamed of in their home countries of Jamaica and Cuba.”

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.”

″ I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. ”

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country.”

“A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.”

“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”

“As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

″‘We live in America,’ he said. ‘Everyone who speaks English understands you. How they interpret you is something else.‘”

“He’d never had any particular ideas about America. He’d never been very patriotic. It was something you took without even thinking. But now it seemed to him . . . For the first time in his whole life he felt that it would be a little pleasant a little comforting to be in the hands of his own people.”

“God, give water in the wilderness, and release streams in the desert. I sprinkle America with the blood of Jesus and pray that the leaders of the nation will be under that covering.”

“Honor ‘AMERICA’ June 14 AT 4 p.m. Be proud of ‘Our Land & People’. Be part of the ‘LIVING FLAG’. Don’t let it be said that Lake Wobegon was ‘Too Busy’. Be on time. 4 p.m. ‘Sharp’.”

“It’s the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can’t help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.”

“By 1778, British peace commissioners were offering to rectify all the American grievances of 1776, ignoring only the demand for independence.”

“Why, America’s the only free nation on earth ... No, no! Couldn’t happen here!”

“But this is America, where men and trees take the most surprising outings.”

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

“I’ve always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn’t worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”

“In America they distrust unhappy people.”

“Would there be room in the boat for me to ride to shore with you?” she begged. “I know it’s silly, but there is America so close to me for the first time in my life – I can’t bear not to set my foot upon it!” “What a child you are, Kit,” smiled Mrs. Eaton. “Sometimes ‘tis hard to believe you are sixteen.”

“I love America more than Maggie Bunn or Lida or Jane! I’m more American than all of them. because- because they were unkind to Father in England.”

“It’s a little story of a family that is set around the turn of the century. The father has to leave his job abruptly and decides to pursue a new career in America. The mother and four children are left in England, staying with two elderly aunts, while the father gets settled.”

“I suppose that in America everything, including education and corrections, is fair game for profiteers.”

″ Foreign people should not be treated like that. America is made up of foreign people.”

Mr. Tudor’s uncle had married an English lady who was third cousin to a living lord, and Amy regarded the whole family with great respect, for in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us—that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old, like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.

In France the young girls have a dull time of it till they are married, when ‘Vive la liberte!’ becomes their motto. In America, as everyone knows, girls early sign the declaration of independence, and enjoy their freedom with republican zest, but the young matrons usually abdicate with the first heir to the throne and go into a seclusion almost as close as a French nunnery, though by no means as quiet.