America Quotes

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

~ William Gibson

You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee's popularity grew after the duty on imports was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished again in 1872.

~ Tom Standage

Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.

~ Orson Scott Card

America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.

~ Orson Scott Card

I smelled war on the horizon, with more deaths and trouble to come Bombing of the Twin TowersFrom Rape of a Nation by Sara Niles

~ Sara Niles

People in America, they're getting dumber, they're getting less able to analyze something and think critically, and pick apart the underlying elements. And more and more ready to make a snap judgment regarding something at face value, which is too bad.

~ William Missouri Downs

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

~ Wyndham Lewis

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

It's hard to get a hug wrong.

~ Kiera Cass

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth

~ Abraham Lincoln

We're a complacent society, hard to get riled up in the first place, and then when we do, it's misdirected.

~ Bill Maher

You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it's absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who'd come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent.And possibly her familiar didn't know the way home. There's not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room.(Before I Wake...)

~ Henry Kuttner

You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science.But you better have religion. You better be ready to profess your faith in and fealty to God — the Judeo-Christian one, of course. And you better be convincing. A dust-up last week in the 2014 race for a United States Senate seat from Arkansas provided a sad reminder of this, showing once again that our ballyhooed separation of church and state is less canyon than itty-bitty crack.

~ Frank Bruni

Brave Americans in past wars didn't die for the actual flag--they died for the freedom it represents, including the freedom to burn it.

~ Bill Maher

It’s been my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they’re going. For them it’s the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello. That’s why trains are so popular at Christmas. People get on to meet their country over the holidays. They’re looking for some friendship, a warm body to talk to. People don’t rush on a train, because that’s not what trains are for. How do you put a dollar value on that? What accounting line does that go on?

~ David Baldacci

Anarchists have taken over (the GOP).

~ Harry Reid

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.

~ Edward Abbey

People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images add up to one big picture, except there's no big picture, just a blob of unrelated and unrelatable images, texts, and poses, the freedom to take what you want from a religion and reject hte rest and be lonely, standing outsdie the warm shelters of temples with your own goon god that no one else can understand.

~ Michael Muhammad Knight

America is bad at discriminating between danger likely to strike again, and red herrings, the freaking helpings of disaster that no man or plan can prevent.

~ Bill Maher

ab Americo Inventore ...quasi Americi terram sive AmericamFrom Amerigo the discoverer ...as if it were the land of Americus, thus America.

~ Martin Waldseemüller

Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, I watched people across the country scrambling to that same irrational altar for their answers. In the fierce storm of emotion that rolled across this country, one realization rose to the surface of my mind with blinding clarity: certainly this mechanism of unassailable blind faith is one of the greatest risks mankind faces today.

~ Nathan Phelps

Woodrow Wilson has just made the decision to take part in World War I. What was he feeling then? Did he know the possible outcomes of his decision? Did he feel the burden of American lives on his shoulders? He probably said something like: Goddamn. I love America but this could be the worst decision in American history. Don't worry yourself Woody, it wasn't.

~ Zachary Crosby

We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.

~ William Herschel

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want.

~ Robin Sloan

I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world. he [Woodenkinfe] said. I don't want a gray world.You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from.Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it.So rather than a melting pot, it would be a...A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.

~ Philip Caputo

New Rule: Food companies must face the facts: One container equals one serving. Look, we’re Americans, and that means once we open the bag, there’s no stopping us until we’re licking stray bits of powdered cheese off the carpet. So stop trying to give us nutritional information based on a fraction of the package. It assumes a talent for two things that we’re really not capable of: restraint and math.

~ Bill Maher

This won't stop her from getting elected...Stupider people get elected all the time. It's America. We love the sleazy. And the crazy.

~ Rachel Caine

Every day in America is a day with a shooting.

~ Bill Maher

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.

~ John F. Kennedy

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash -- all of them -- surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness -- chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

~ John Steinbeck

Brutality and injustice made us raise our hands towards the sky for years; God didn’t respond us, but drones came to our rescue.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Do not fuck with gun nuts because they are nuts about their guns.

~ Bill Maher

New Rule: America has every right ot bitch about gas prices suddenly shooting up. How could we have known? Oh, wait, there was that teensy, tiny thing about being warned constantly over the last forty years but still creating more urban sprawl, failing to build public transport, buying gas-guzzlers, and voting for oil company shills. So, New Rule: Shut the fuck up about gas prices.

~ Bill Maher

The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.

~ Chris Hayes

What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.

~ Saul Bellow

It's not that we don't care--it's just that that we'd prefer not to get involved.

~ Bill Maher

After September 11th, I never much liked the trend of everyone and his brother wearing the hats and jackets of the NYPD and FDNY. Only the people who do the job should get to wear the hat. Would you wear someone else's Medal of Honor? Yes, it's a tribute, and sincere tribute is always appropriate for these brave people. But wearing their symbols is also rubbing off a piece of heroism that isn't yours.

~ Bill Maher

This is the opposite of the free market.

~ Bill Maher

We were asked to do very little, and we responded. That's the bargain we tacitly make with our presidents: we won't ask too much of you, if you don't ask too much of us.

~ Bill Maher