America Quotes - Page 3

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Delaware: a state that has three counties when the tide is out and two when it is in.

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

My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

Dream sets us on fire.Dream gives us direction.Dream betters our potential.Dream helps us prioritize.Dream adds value to our work andlife.Dream colors our future.

But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind’s eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.

Freedman Town serves a good purpose - not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are'.

Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the 20th century is that they tread the same path.

Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.

China has no choice but to emulate the power of America’s founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.

That Yank glean is long gone anyway; money, sex, power, it’s gone global – no one has a monopoly on it anymore. The towering skyscrapers of New York had fallen long before the second plane; we all knew it. The twang of the Yank accent doesn’t give girls that twinge these days, even the dollar sign is looking dated, its day long past. No, America doesn’t have it anymore.But then nowhere does. We don’t chop the world up by borders anymore, don’t slice peoples and dice continents. It’s all a sweltering mess, a fucking free-for-all. We went global centuries ago, today we’ve gone digital, and digital doesn’t have borders.

In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

Racism in impenetrable. Staying in America means always fighting. For our own sanity and safety, we must go.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in opposite directions.

What is the difference? Tell me what is the difference between you and me. We both kill for what we want," the man asks."We lived here first.

Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!

The eyes of hope looking over the flare of the hood into the maw with its white line feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure something that's been going on in America ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat—

Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let 'em know: WEOUTCHEA.

And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I’m open for business, because I’ve got a better one than E pluribus unum. Tu dormis, tu perdis . . . You snooze, you lose.

Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.

You've lived in America for twenty years. Eat badly, damn it.

I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.

The joke was that President Bush only declared war when Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone has to pay.

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand."-Harry S. Truman

A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of education, the incredible divide between private and public schools that makes all of the fine speeches by our policy makers— most of whom send their children to private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people— all the more insidious and insincere.

We are soon approaching a refined holiday, "Merry Mas," where Christ will be taken out of its context.

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

The highest possible form of treason," said Minton," is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.

Liberia gave life, America gives me a DREAM.

The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.Sincerely yours, P. Soames

We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.

In America, anybody can be president.That's one of the risks you take.

Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.

Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back.

This (San Francisco) is the most beautiful city in America, Probably because it looks nothing like America

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

Healing in America is being able to call it our home, to build a future for our children, to still believe in tough times, to remember our forefathers, and stepping forward together towards a common solution

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.

Cultures that do not wish to exist cannot be dissuaded from destroying themselves.

The premise that America’s power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America’s magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy.

This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.

Well we're waiting here in Allentown,For the Pennsylvania we never found,For the promises our teachers gave,If we worked hard,If we behaved...So the graduations hang on the wall,But they never really helped us at all,No they never taught us what was real,Iron and coke,And chromium steel,And we're waiting here in Allentown...But they've taken all the coal from the ground,And the union people crawled away...

Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

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.

Business is as old as life. There is no living being that does not have a business.

America this is quite serious

What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5-o-'clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it. Underneath all that white noise there's a lack.