Motivational Quotes

America

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about America

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.

Stein, Gertrude

America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.

Starr, Ringo

It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.

Reagan, Ronald

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

Byron, Lord

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

Eco, Umberto

I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem -- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

I believe America's best days are ahead of us because I believe that the future belongs to freedom, not to fear.

John Kerry

Intellectually, I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

Sinclair Lewis

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

Maritain, Jacques

11.

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...

Ballard, J. G.

12.

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.

James, Henry

13.

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

Sigmund Freud

14.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is...

Lewis, Sinclair

15.

If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.

Frost, Robert

16.

I just want to say this. I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly: There is a tendency for the world to say to America, "the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out," and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.

Tony Blair

17.

Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

Miller, Henry

18.

America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.

Laurence J. Peter

19.

Double, no triple, our troubles and we'd still be better off than any other people on earth. It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.

Reagan, Ronald

20.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Delillo, Don

21.

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.

Welles, Orson

22.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.

Shirley Chisholm

24.

America is a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.

Rogers, Will

25.

I'm not going to quit. Why should I quit? This country is worth fighting for.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

26.

I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.

Harper, Michael S.

27.

America's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better.

Anthony Walton

28.

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

Eco, Umberto

29.

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

Asquith, Margot

30.

There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

31.

Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who's out in front of nobody? Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.

O'Rourke, P. J.

32.

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

33.

I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.

Carl Sandburg

34.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

35.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

36.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde

37.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

Woodrow Wilson

38.

By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand.

George W. Bush

39.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

40.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Burke, Edmund

41.

Knavery seems to be so much a the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.

King George III

42.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Freud, Sigmund

43.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

James, Henry

44.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

45.

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.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

46.

In America everything's about who's number one today.

Springsteen, Bruce

47.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

Gunther, John

48.

Only Americans can hurt America.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

49.

You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We are nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it's merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we've set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

W. Somerset Maugham

50.

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Eagleburger, Lawrence S.