America Quotes

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?

~ Dave Eggers

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

~ Arundhati Roy

He’s America in action — opposed to quality.

~ James Purdy

The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can't control the rage that's building in the world. You just can't. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?

~ Arundhati Roy

See, this is what the United States of America is all about.You can wrestle a thousand bears and chew on a billion knives but in the end, you are only as good as the dude who stops you from dying of a gunshot while fucking a coyote.

~ Cory O'brien

A year ago he had been in America. Two years ago he had been straight. Tonight he was underground, with the remains of the bogey man, lit by the torches of the children who had killed him.

~ Caleb Crain

[America]'s higher education system is excellent, both in terms of quality and accessibility. Here anybody can go to college. Many countries simply can't accommodate many students. And by the way, most people who came here in the seventies came to get an education. They didn't wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to America to be free.' they said, 'I'll go there to get an education.' That's an important distinction. It was only after they were here for a while that they fully appreciated the freedoms we enjoy here.

~ Mahbod Seraji

When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there’s no one to point fingers at you. It’s just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can’t do shit.

~ Alex Latimer

Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, twenty-four centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens.

~ Russell Kirk

Every part of Nigeria is blessed.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

I love Las Vegas because it's the one city less classy than Los Angeles.

~ J. Richard Singleton

Los Angeles is a city made up of refugees from better cities.

~ J. Richard Singleton

They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women.

~ Alan Moore

America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.

~ Michael Gold

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918.

~ Cat Winters

This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it's a lie but you buy into it and that's all that matters.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Those who have committed no faults want no pardon. We are only defending what we deem our indisputable rights.

~ George Washington

And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?

~ Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.

~ Henry Johnson Jr

Helping each other out, that's America.

~ Chris Kyle

American dream,a spouse,a brace of children,cuddly pets,coffee-table books,rusted skeleton keys,plastic cauliflower bags,business cards of business-card printers,a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day,all echoes and loneliness.

~ Brian D'ambrosio

The American political system is like fast food--mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things...and everybody wants some.

~ P.j. O'rourke

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

~ John F. Kennedy

That had been the end of Communism. I had a feeling watching the tape that America would be next, but for once I kept my mouth shut. In my silence I felt our common ground: here we were, two men, neither young, neither with money, neither earning a penny or holding down a job or owning a house, both thoroughly confused by the way the world was turning.

~ Don J. Snyder

All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off.

~ Don J. Snyder

It didn't get much more patriotic than sex in a Chevy on the Fourth of July. God bless America.

~ Kate Meader

To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.

~ David Treuer

Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let 'em know: WEOUTCHEA.

~ Eddie Huang

There is no more contemptible sound than a gunshot.

~ Jonathan Heatt

I consider myself an American African because we did not come by choice.

~ Alafia Stewart

Liberia gave life, America gives me a DREAM.

~ Henry Johnson Jr

... walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man's ancient history. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he's going farther away to look for other planets, very good. But know thyself first. That is what I would tell my American friend.

~ Tsegaye Gebre Medhin

Something about being that close to him all the time made my bones feel weak.

~ Kiera Cass

I was stunned into silence, the way I always was when he touched the sky places of my heart.

~ Kiera Cass

How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?

~ Zia Haider Rahman

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling “the Republic of Imagination.” I think of it as Nabokov’s “somehow, somewhere” or Alice’s backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane.

~ Azar Nafisi

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. “A native of America who cannot read or write,” said John Adams, “is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake.

~ Azar Nafisi

The most pressing problem facing America can't be solved in Washington DC. True hope and change can't be found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It can only be found at the foot of the cross on Calvary.

~ Todd Starnes

Everyone I have spoken with about working with the Russians in space exploration believes that the United States has learned a great deal from Russia and that Russia has learned a great deal from the United States – and that the entire international space partnership is much better because of it.

~ Ron Garan