Popular quotes about American! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 43
I think there's a pride of what a real American can be. I mean, I'm a transplant, but I've got American kids and an American wife, and when I go back to England I feel more like an American, the way I look at the world, is more from an American perspective at this point. I've traveled every state 30 or 40 times, and have met an amazing array of people, and I have found Americans to be among the most kind and tolerant people I have ever met.
Dave WakelingI am an American. Black. Conservative. I don't use African-American, because I'm American, I'm black and I'm conservative. I don't like people trying to label me. African- American is socially acceptable for some people, but I am not some people.
Herman CainI think what I'm doing is quintessentially American because I'm not American - even though I am on the verge of getting my American passport next week - I have a fantasy of what is American. Big spaces, Marlon Brando, James Dean, easy living.
Italo ZucchelliThere can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
Theodore RooseveltThe white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
Maya AngelouAccording to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American's output-which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American's living standard would at least double.
Paul Craig RobertsWe need American sources of resources, we need American energy, brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.
Sarah PalinWhen African-American police officers involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?
Mike PenceAmerican art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry AdamsI don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.
George CarlinI'm Mexican-American, but for a long time I was pushed out of any references to Mexican-American writers. It was easier to come out as a gay man than it was to come out as a Mexican-American.
John RechyI've never felt more American than I did when I moved to England. It becomes a real kind of part of your identity: "Oh, Ben. He's the American guy." I think when you say you're from New York you get a different reception then if you just say, "I'm American." So I'd always kind of make sure I was a New Yorker first.
Ben SchnetzerI have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. The working theory behind the intelligence report on Russian interference in the president election is that Russia influenced American public opinion. We may not like that, but if it influenced American public opinion, at least in the guise of legitimate activity - which is what the report says - then there's nothing you can do about that. Where it would be improper and illegal would be if there was actual collusion in those efforts. We don't know that.
Masha GessenIt seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theaterโฆ it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.
Kurt WeillI have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.
Robert SpencerI always had this huge respect for American filmmakers and American actors. I always had this very strong love and respect for the American cinema. I always knew that I was going to leave Sweden.
Noomi RapaceWe are developing in the United States a huge underclass of unwanted people, many of them the descendants of the exploitation of the South American and Latin American countries by American piratical capitalism. Not all capitalism is piratical, but some of it certainly is. And we have a fantastic gap beginning to exist between rich and poor.
Benedict GroeschelPerhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, naรฏve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.
Henry MillerI'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.
Ana CastilloMy favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, "We're not going to harm you. We're American soldiers."
George H. W. BushThe American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
Archibald MacLeishThroughout American history, the political leaders have always exhorted the American people to be nice and quiet and leave things to them. But when very serious evils confronted the American people, they had to go beyond the Congressmen and Senators, and they had to commit civil disobedience and they had even to break the law.
Howard ZinnThe average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.
Mark TwainI don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn't feel like a line to me. You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that's, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesThis is a nation of immigrants. We welcome people coming to this country as immigrants. My dad was born in Mexico of American parents; Ann's dad was born in Wales and is a first-generation American. We welcome legal immigrants into this country.
Mitt RomneyI want to see us to explore outer space. But I want to do it safely, without the loss of human life, and democratically: where is the free-wheeling debate on this question? Only one force can stop this mission: the will of the American people. They have not been asked. Do they want to endanger their loved ones, their industry with this launch? One force is more powerful than plutonium, the spirit of the American people united.
Michio KakuGod forbid that the day should ever come when, in the American mind, the thought of man as a consumer shall submerge the old American thought of man as a creature of God, endowed with unalienable rights.
Benjamin HarrisonI think the African American community, the Latino community, the Native American communities have borne an unfair burden in the last century, and continue to.
Van JonesWe can have no '50-50' allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.
Theodore RooseveltI think that we're at an alarming moment in American political development and maybe in world political development, because the United States is so influential. If the trends of the last thirty or forty years are not halted and reversed - and those trends include increasingly inequality, a crumbling public life, a disintegrating public infrastructure, an exhausted ecology, and a huge war arsenal, and more and more war making - then I'm rather gloomy about the prospects for the American future and the harm that the United States could do to the world.
Frances Fox PivenThe keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
Raymond ChandlerI think there's just a lot of apprehension in Australia about the Trump victory. It's not that there are - some people are supportive, of course, and some people are dismayed by it. I think one thing that draws most people together - maybe 80 percent of the people - is a very strong view of American leadership and the American alliance.
Richard GloverI've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about. When they say that we're buying too much from overseas, that we're sending too many dollars overseas to get all these goods and services they got, they're saying that the American dollar is too strong and that is hurting our economy. And the result of this will be that the American dollar will get too weak, and that will hurt our economy.
P. J. O'RourkeWhen I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.
Wynton MarsalisAll you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesBeing American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing.
Kurt VonnegutI will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.
Rand PaulI think our time should be spent on talking about those things that unite us as Americans and deliver for the American public. And I think that is something that is a better use of everyone's time, and this is going to further the cause of the American people a lot more than focusing on divisions.
Will HurdCitizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.
Andrew WeilIt's the first thing liberals notice about people is what group are you in! "What group do I put you in? Are you a woman? Are you lesbian? Are you straight? Are you Native American? Are you African-American? Are you a mix? What are you?" That's how they see people, because that then identifies the victim status they hold. Victims of what? Victims of America! All these people are victims of America, "the white, patriarchal majority." They're all victims of America, as the left sees them.
Rush LimbaughThe American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.
James F. CooperI'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.
August WilsonDuring the Reagan eighties, the idea that money was a good thing - it was good to be rich; that wealth was a reflection of your character. We see this today in perceptions of Donald Trump: the idea that money is an expression of success and even goodness. I compare that with my dad's generation, where the American Dream was about giving your kids a better life, but not just in material terms. The American Dream was also about doing something good in the world. The home was at the center of the dream, but home also represented community, shelter, and stability for your family.
Lauren GreenfieldI'm one of those persons who think that watching black people suffer is not an idea of entertainment. I know a lot about African American history, which is just American history, it's always been very fascinating to me. The premise of the play is remembering and honoring those persons whose stories would never be taken into account.
Harry Lennix