The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam…
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
If you think the United States has stood still, who built The largest shopping center in the world?
—Richard Nixon (1913–94) American Head of State, Lawyer
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you—no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Critic
Solitude is un-American.
—Erica Jong (b.1942) American Novelist, Feminist
I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) American Head of State, Lawyer
Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is…”
—Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.
—Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) Soviet Leader
America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
—John Mason Brown (1900–69) American Author, Drama Critic
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
—Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American Novelist
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels—men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American Head of State, Military Leader
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.
—e. e. cummings (1894–1962) American Poet, Writer, Painter
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.
—Willa Cather (1873–1947) American Novelist, Writer
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French Statesman, Physician, Journalist
One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
—Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) American Painter
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American Head of State
America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, “What is he?” But “What can he do?”
—Indian Proverb
On Thanksgiving Day, all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment—half- time.
—Indian Proverb
Most people are looking for security, a nice, safe, prosperous future. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s called the American Dream.
—Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) American Businessperson
The home of freedom, and the hope of the down-trodden and oppressed among the nations of the earth.
—Daniel Webster (1782–1852) American Statesman, Lawyer
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 (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism—that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
—Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) American Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic
People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer
America is a fortunate country; she grows by the follies of our European nations.
—Napoleon I (1769–1821) Emperor of France
Leave a Reply