AMERICA QUOTES V
quotations about America
Americans are always moving on.
It's an old Spanish custom gone astray,
A sort of English fever, I believe,
Or just a mere desire to take French leave,
I couldn't say. I couldn't really say.
But, when the whistle blows, they go away.
Sometimes there never was a whistle blown,
But they don't care, for they can blow their own
Whistles of willow-stick and rabbit-bone,
Quail-calling through the rain
A dozen tunes but only one refrain,
"We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!"
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
prelude, Western Star
America can restore its strengths as the world-respected land of opportunity by returning to open-society principles. An open society invests in people and new ideas, rewards talent and hard work, values dialogue and learns from dissent, operates to high standards with transparent information, looks for common ground, sees problems as opportunities for creative change, and encourages those who are fortunate to help others get the same chance, because service is the highest ideal. With such standards in mind, America the Beautiful can return to its admired role as America the Principled.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
America the Principled
You look out right now at the presidential contests and the startling, dismaying probabilities, and it's hard not to wonder if something dramatically wrong isn't happening to America. It is. Too many things are falling apart. Trust has disappeared. The white working class is in agony. Family dissolution is a fact of life. The economy is poking along. The debt is racing along. And now we have a political reality show.
JAY AMBROSE
"Much of America is falling apart", Ventura County Star, March 4, 2016
There seems to be an alternative reality out there, from some of the political folks, that America's down in the dumps. It's not. America is pretty darn great right now and making strides.
BARACK OBAMA
"Obama touts job numbers: America is 'pretty darn great'", The Hill, March 4, 2016
There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT
The Arrogance of Power
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in this world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1953
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
RINGO STARR
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Great British Humor
In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If we have learned anything in the past ten years, it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning. And we've been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we've allocated the wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We've never had justice in our courts for the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It's not that special. It really isn't.
HOWARD ZINN
Voices of a People's History of the United States
All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed -- selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful -- we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic -- and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
First Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789
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
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
OSCAR WILDE
attributed, Hating America: A History
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
The American Dream -- that anyone can achieve success through hard work, grit and determination -- has always had a complicated relationship with the American Reality. Children born at the bottom of the income distribution are more likely than not to stay there. If you're a person of color or your parents aren't married, your odds of rising up are even worse. Policymakers on the left and right often tout education as the bridge to help poor kids make their way up the income ladder -- people with more education make more money. But striking new research from the Brookings Institution shows that simply sending more kids to college won't fix income inequality: As it turns out, a college degree is worth a lot less, earnings-wise, to poor kids than to rich ones.
CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM
"Still think America is the land of opportunity? Look at this chart.", Washington Post, February 22, 2016
Each time Donald Trump says he will make America great again, he's declaring without actually declaring out loud two very unAmerican things. One: America now stinks. Two: America was great when WASP white men were in charge before that black guy took over and women in sports jackets got involved. How not-great is it to bring that plate of hate to our table of thought?
LINDA STASI
"America is much greater than the GOP makes it seem", New York Daily News, March 8, 2016
A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road--after all, that's where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast. It's also full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to notice from the ground (and difficult to pick out from six miles up in an airliner): quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identifiable by their fencing (though some mega high schools can look similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked in locations where normal traffic won't pass by. I never tire of the view from this height, as different from the normal, grim airliner perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship.
JAMES FALLOWS
"How America Is Putting Itself Back Together", The Atlantic, March 2016
This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
JACK KEROUAC
On the Road
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Character and Opinion in the United States