AMERICA QUOTES VI
quotations about America
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
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
America is suffering from an extended spiritual drought. While the social and moral decay of this hour may grieve us, discernment of the larger reason for this blight lies at the door of an all-but-prayerless church.
JACK HAYFORD
"America Is Suffering From a Spiritual Drought", Charisma News, March 7, 2016
America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
AYN RAND
Capitalism: The Unknown Deal
America is a lady rocking on a porch in an unpainted house on an unused road.
ANNE SEXTON
"Sixth Psalm", The Complete Poems
I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
The American Dream means giving it your all, trying your hardest, accomplishing something. And then I'd add to that, giving something back. No definition of a successful life can do anything but include serving others.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
interview, Academy of Achievement, Jun. 2, 1995
The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
RICHARD NIXON
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969
That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
GEORGE CARLIN
standup routine
But now we are becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated--free markets, trade, immigration, and technological change. And all this is happening when the tide is going our way. Just as the world is opening up, America is closing down.
FAREED ZAKARIA
The Post-American World: Release 2.0
The fact that the Constitution is sufficiently open-ended to infuriate all Americans almost equally is part of its enduring genius.
DAHLIA LITHWICK
"Read It and Weep: How the Tea Party's fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble", Slate, January 4, 2011
It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life -- a life that should be new in freedom.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Third Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1941
It's an election year, and candidates can't stop speaking about our country's problems (which, of course, only they can solve). As a result of this negative drumbeat, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as well as they themselves do. That view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history. American GDP per capita is now about $56,000.... That -- in real terms -- is a staggering six times the amount in 1930, the year I was born, a leap far beyond the wildest dreams of my parents or their contemporaries. U. S. citizens are not intrinsically more intelligent today, nor do they work harder than did Americans in 1930. Rather, they work far more efficiently and thereby produce more. This all-powerful trend is certain to continue: America's economic magic remains alive and well.
WARREN BUFFETT
annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, February 2016
Donald Trump marched into the political scene last year and claimed he is going to "Make America Great Again." The theme revolves around one question: who is the real American? In other words, Trump is trying to draw a clear line between his supposed rightful Americans -- who deserve proper access to the Bill of Rights -- and the unfavorable cast-offs of American society. Trump's idea of a great America is to cut off and reject those he deems unfit. It seems to be ridiculous, but just ridiculous enough to hit a sweet spot with an increasingly ridiculous voting populace.
PHOEBE KUO
"Trump's Vision of America is Founded on Exclusion", NYU News, March 8, 2016
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Most people, I suspect, still have in their minds an image of America as the great land of college education, unique in the extent to which higher learning is offered to the population at large. That image used to correspond to reality. But these days young Americans are considerably less likely than young people in many other countries to graduate from college. In fact, we have a college graduation rate that's slightly below the average across all advanced economies.
PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, Oct. 8, 2009
There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.
BARACK OBAMA
attributed, Of Thee I Speak: A Collection of Patriotic Quotes
Everything in America is big: the streets, skyscrapers, glasses of Coca-Cola, bags of popcorn, and glasses of beer. The one thing here that comes in small amounts is respect. The American does not have to respect anyone. He does what he wants, says what he wants, and moves around in the way he wants. I wonder whether it is an excessive respect for his individual freedom or a rejection of all the traditions of the Old World in the New World.
KARIMA KAMAL
"An Egyptian Girl in America", America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature
America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The Paris Review, spring/summer 1957