Americans Quotes
189 quotes
"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
"Too bad Americans can’t export Awesome, because I have boxes and boxes of the stuff just lying around in my attic."
"A slinky is a toy made for stairs, but that’s entirely too tiresome. What about a toy for escalators that doesn’t move and does nothing and that’s the whole point? I think Americans would relate to and embrace that mentality."
"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."
"4 in 5 Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, which begs the question: Are 1 in 5 Americans retarded?"
"Where humanitysowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed."
"In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others."
"Within he felt that faint stirring of derision for the whole business of life which is the salt of the American mentality. Outwardly they are sentimental and enthusiastic and inwardly they are profoundly cynical."
"I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously"
"More than three fourths of all Americans are vitamin D-deficient."
John Cannell, Athlete's Edge: Faster, Quicker, Stronger with Vitamin D
"I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many."
"The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear."
Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.
"Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits."
"So, Americans, then. Self-appointed vigilante defenders of the world, kind of like Superman, if Superman was retarded and only fought crime when he felt like it."
"That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent."
"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."
"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials."
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
"People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced - but moving..."
"Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy."
"Maybe the Americans should have brought baseballs instead of bombs."
"To be an American is to be accosted by bigotry and enmity for the rights that you were told to appreciate."
"The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it."
"I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm"
"He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration."
"It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups."
"We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans"
"A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out."
"Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak."
"Americans by the very nature of the soft fat they collected around their brains along with all of their comforts, their total ignorance of historical meanings, their delusion that anarchists were either comic little men plotting nothings in a dark cellar or misunderstood cranks--how could Americans be taken seriously in a world of real politics?"
"Because taxpaying is seen as an emblem of civic worthiness, denying the poor the status of taxpayers has the effect of denying their political standing. Classing a large percentage of the populace as a kind of second-class citizenry is genuinely toxic for democratic norms."
Vanessa Williamson, Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes
"The Democratic Party of the USA would greatly appreciate your cooperation with re-installing Mr & Mrs Pinocchio into the White House."
"A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs."
"Some people are so much heaven to the square inch that life is simply hell, when she leaves you in order to go south for the winter. (Yes, women are people too, sometimes even threee.)"
"Everything is possible in America, except the production of intelligence."
"Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive."
"It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out."
"Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers."
"That's what it means to be an American. To be free to love who and what you want, and to keep a lot in your heart at once."
"Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind."
"What a fine fellow is Quincey! I believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy’s death as any of us, but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed."
"Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it."
"You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else."
"When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure."
"And then this whole deal of new gods, old gods," said his friend. "You ask me, I welcome new gods. Bring the on. The god of guns. The god of bombs. All the gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy and blame. All the stuff they try and land me with. Take a lot of the weight off my shoulders."
"Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America--we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture."
Stephen Colbert, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't
"The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance."
"At the unconscious level, Americans believe that good people succeed, that success is bestowed upon you by God. Your success demonstrates that God loves you."
"After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there."
"Americans share an affinity to establish a distinctive identity and know one’s self in a physiological, psychological, and spiritual sense, and we strive to attain self-actualization, self-realization, and/or bliss."
Showing 50 of 189 quotes