Quotes and aphorisms on America
Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
George W. Bush
America is a Nation with a mission – and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace – a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.
George W. Bush
Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.
George W. Bush
I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.
George W. Bush
America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.
George W. Bush
America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.
George W. Bush
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
George W. Bush
The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.
George W. Bush
Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.
George W. Bush
For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible – and no one can now doubt the word of America.
George W. Bush
I will never relent in defending America – whatever it takes.
George W. Bush
The United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.
George W. Bush
The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror – and America is honored to be their friend.
George W. Bush
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
Alan Watts
America – a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.
Herbert Hoover
In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.
Herbert Hoover
If you’re going to America, bring your own food.
Fran Lebowitz
I won’t be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.
Babe Ruth
Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.
Thomas Sowell
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
Thomas Sowell
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
Bertrand Russell
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
Andy Rooney
There are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.
Herman Melville
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises… the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Herman Melville
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
Alexis de Tocqueville
America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
John Quincy Adams
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
Saul Bellow
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
Saul Bellow
What is going on in America is extreme. The youth cult, they worship youth so much it’s almost paranoid. And LA is the Mecca of it all; they’re taking it to the hilt.
Billie Joe Armstrong
America’s trying to do the best for its veterans.
R. Lee Ermey
Everybody respects the Vietnam Veterans of America.
R. Lee Ermey
These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.
Jimmy Buffett
Let me tell you who we conservatives are: we love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims.
Rush Limbaugh
I reject the notion that America is in a well-deserved decline, that she and her citizens are unexceptional. I do not believe America is the problem in the world. I believe America is the solution to the world’s problems.
Rush Limbaugh
Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
Leon Trotsky
I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.
Shirley Chisholm
America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.
P. J. O’Rourke
The men who have guided the destiny of the United States have found the strength for their tasks by going to their knees. This private unity of public men and their God is an enduring source of reassurance for the people of America.
Lyndon B. Johnson
I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad: that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength; our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.
Lyndon B. Johnson
This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.
Lyndon B. Johnson
America is just downright mean.
Michelle Obama
Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would standing here as the first African-American First Lady.
Michelle Obama
The fact is, with every friendship you make, and every bond of trust you establish, you are shaping the image of America projected to the rest of the world. That is so important. So when you study abroad, you’re actually helping to make America stronger.
Michelle Obama
America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.
Alexander Graham Bell
People in the United Kingdom and outside the United States share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn’t share with itself.
Bill Hicks
A free America… means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
James Joyce
This dark diction has become America’s addiction.
Kanye West
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
Fidel Castro
We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.
George H. W. Bush
America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.
George H. W. Bush
When bright young minds can’t afford college, America pays the price.
Arthur Ashe
The hardest that I’ve laughed at a movie was probably Team America. I laughed ‘til I thought I was just gonna throw up. I almost had to turn it off.
Ron White
Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America.
William Howard Taft
The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.
Ted Nugent
I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
George Soros
America doesn’t reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.
Meryl Streep
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.
Jimmy Carter
In America any boy may become President and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes.
Adlai E. Stevenson
It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man-not a color.
Adlai E. Stevenson
My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
Christopher Walken
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
Marshall McLuhan
The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive ‘policies’ and ‘Plans’ of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word ‘socialism’, but what else can one call it?
H. G. Wells
America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Football combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
George Will
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana
France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are “made in America.”
Helen Rowland
No matter where you go and what you do in America, you turn the tele on and you’re confronted with violence.
Steve Irwin
A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories.
Maynard James Keenan
Many of you are well enough off that the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
Hillary Clinton
The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
Gerald R. Ford
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
W. H. Auden
It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
W. H. Auden
You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
W. H. Auden
Discussion in America means dissent.
James Thurber
It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
Eric Hoffer
When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.
Patrick Henry
America will be far safer if we reduce the chances of a terrorist attack in one of our cities than if we diminish the civil liberties of our own people.
Nancy Pelosi
America must be a light to the world, not just a missile.
Nancy Pelosi
In America the schools have become too permissive, the kids now are controlling the schools, the tail is wagging the dog. We’ve got to make a change there and get it back to where the teachers have control of the classrooms.
Chuck Norris
Some of the most miserable people I know are some of the richest people in America, they are the most miserable individuals I’ve ever seen.
Chuck Norris
I spend a good portion of my dinner-party conversation defending America because no matter what the political agenda, it’s still a fantastic, amazing place.
Gwyneth Paltrow
America has everything, why should they want us.
George Harrison
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.
Ann Coulter
Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America today because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments.
Ann Coulter
While attendance at traditional churches has been declining for decades… the evangelical movement is growing, and it is changing the way America worships.
Tom Brokaw
Even with politics, stuff comes around again. Woody Guthrie would recognize America today.
Billy Bragg
An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.
Billy Bragg
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.
Jerry Garcia
What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.
Jerry Garcia
The freedom to be an individual is the essence of America.
Marilyn vos Savant
What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom “to” and freedom “from.”
Marilyn vos Savant
By the Declaration of Independence, dreaded by the foes an for a time doubtfully viewed by many of the friends of America, everything stood on a new and more respectable footing, both with regard to the operations of war or negotiations with foreign powers.
Mercy Otis Warren
A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia.
Mercy Otis Warren
America needs rebooting.
Thomas Friedman
I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now; relaxed! Cause when I heard the police car I knew they weren’t coming after me!
Richard Pryor
Movies are movies, and I don’t think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense.
Richard Pryor
The Queen Mary was the most civilized and luxurious way one could travel to America in the late 1930s.
Maureen O’Hara
There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Otto von Bismarck
America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
