America Quotes

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.

~ William Stringfellow

Freedom is not reserved for those unwilling to fight for it.

~ Ben Carson

In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Deity, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.Religion's first lesson is humility; its fruit, charity. In the great and sublime ends of Providence, little things are lost, and least of all is he imbued with a right spirit who believes that insignificant observances, subtleties of doctrine, and minor distinctions, enter into the great essentials of the Christian character. The wisest thing for him who is disposed to cavil at the immaterial habits of his neighbor, to split straws on doctrine, to fancy trifles of importance, and to place the man before principles, would be to distrust himself.

~ James Fenimore Cooper

Shit, this woman's scary. I'm glad my manager's the short one with the wispy hair and the shaking hands. Milo knows how to get stuff done, but he's about as terrifying as a goldfish.

~ C.m. Stunich

Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

God is forgotten, the mighty dollar has taken his place and the mechanic cannot ease the troubled soul. The road is closed. Under circumstances such as these America only increases speed. America will not stop for anything, it wants to get on, go on, forge a way ahead. Should America turn back? Absolutely not! It simply increases the pace a hundredfold, acts the hurricane and whips life up to a white heat. In Europe nowadays we have the word Americanism, the old days had festina lente.

~ Knut Hamsun

I feel proud that I have been counted worthy to have blood shed by a traitor, and to suffer torture at the hands of those who have undertaken to trail our Flag in the dust. Signed, Yours as Ever, Franklin M. Haven.

~ Franklin Marion Havens

I can remember whendelusions of grandeur entailed wanting tobe a rock star, movie star,a millionaire; to make itas a writer—now it seems that it’sto want to earn adecent living

~ Phil Volatile

A person has to ignore the larger social, economic, political, and religious climate of early North American colonialism to advance the Christian nation myth.

~ David D. Flowers

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’”Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I love your hair! Marlee gushed. I wish I'd been born with red hair. It makes you look so alive. I hear that people with red hair have bed tempers. Is that true?Despite my rotten day, Marlee's manner was so vivacious that my smile grew wider. I don't think so. I mean, I can have a bad temper at times, but my sister is a redhead, and she's as sweet as can be.

~ Kiera Cass

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

~ Jack Gilbert

In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.

~ Tim O'brien

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!

~ Arthur Miller

How had I lost so much in such a short period of time? It would seem like leaving your family, living in some foreign place, and being separated from the person you love should be events that take years to roll into place, not just a day.

~ Kiera Cass

But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.

~ Aleister Crowley

It’s just another notch in the good ol’ fucked up, modern America belt.

~ S.l. Jennings

You will also be called upon to provide well-timed distractions. Get the whole country arguing about sex education or gays in the military, and Americans will stop paying attention to all the things they should fear.

~ Kirsten Miller

We are the pioneers of the world, the advance-guard sent on through the wilderness of untried things...

~ Herman Melville

Jefferson also founded the first intentionally secularized university in America. His vision for the University of Virginia was for education finally free from traditional Christian dogma. He had a disdain for the influence that institutional Christianity had on education. At the University of Virginia there was no Christian curriculum and the school had no chaplain.

~ Daryl C. Cornett

America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.

~ Herbert Hoover

America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and all this ceremonial praying is hard on Billy.

~ Ben Fountain

To evoke another great phrase of the American revolutionary heritage — widely though inconclusively attributed to Thomas Jefferson — the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Such a phrase is merely trite, however, unless we consider its deeper implications. For the French revolutionaries, as for so many regimes that have succeeded them across the world up to the present day, the call for vigilance against enemies, both external and internal, was the first step on the road to the loss of liberty, and lives.Of far more significance, and the true and tragic lesson of the epic descent into The Terror, is the summons to vigilance against ourselves — that we should not assume that we are righteous, and our enemies evil; that we can see clearly, and to others are blinded by malice or folly; that we can abrogate the fragile rights of others in the name of our own certainty and all will be well regardless.If we do not honor the message of human rights born in the revolutions of 1776 and 1786, as the French in their case most certainly failed to do, we too are on the road to The Terror.

~ David Andress

America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we’ve been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don’t want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs.

~ Heather Choate Davis

In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.

~ Michael Graves

I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.

~ Craig Stone

I had the feeling that all over America such stupid arguments were taking place on street corners and in bars and restaurants. All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say I don't take any shit! and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.

~ William S. Burroughs

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people, anyway. For years I've regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.

~ Bill Bryson

My brothers and sisters of America, there is not the least shadow of hope that India can ever be Christianised. After two hundred years of vain efforts and of spending millions of dollars with the prestige of the conqueror and backed by British bayonets, Christianity is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained partly by the money flowing from England and America, and partly by taxes imposed upon the Hindus against their will, which must be paid although the people st

~ Virchand Gandhi

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

~ Gary Shteyngart

But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It’s not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.

~ Robert Stone

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

~ Gary Shteyngart

Americans live not by facts, but by a lengthy list of myths.

~ Dave Champion

It is best if the guard is in love with America and wants to overawe the American by being a premium guard. This kind of guard thinks that he will encounter the American again one day in America, and that the American will offer to take him to a Chicago Bulls game, and buy him blue jeans and whitebread and delicate toilet paper. This guard dreams of speaking Englishwithout an accent and obtaining a wife with an unmalleable bosom. This guard will confess that he does not love where he lives.The other kind of guard is also in love with America, but he will hate the American for being an American. This is worst. This guard knows he will never go to America, and knows that he will never meet the American again. He will steal from the American, and terror the American, only to teach that he can.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect.

~ James A. Haught

American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

~ Charles E. Rosenberg

It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.

~ David Baldacci