Americans Quotes

Where humanitysowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed.

~ Aberjhani

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

~ Stephen Fry

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.

~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

~ Gore Vidal

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

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.

~ Yahtzee Croshaw

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.

~ Josh Bazell

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.

~ Thomas Geoghegan

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

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...

~ Elizabeth Strout

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

~ Mark Twain

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.

~ Philip Caputo

Maybe the Americans should have brought baseballs instead of bombs.

~ Ann E. Burg

To be an American is to be accosted by bigotry and enmity for the rights that you were told to appreciate.

~ Tennessee West

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.

~ G. Willow Wilson

I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm

~ Lindsey Kelk

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.

~ Michael Pollan

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.

~ Henry A. Wallace

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

~ Zbigniew Brzeziński

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.

~ Jill Lepore

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet.... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way--on their own terms.

~ George Packer

Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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?

~ Helen Macinnes

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

The Democratic Party of the USA would greatly appreciate your cooperation with re-installing Mr & Mrs Pinocchio into the White House.

~ Steven Magee

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.

~ Robert D. Kaplan

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.)

~ Will Advise

Everything is possible in America, except the production of intelligence.

~ Mie Hansson

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

~ Peter Hitchens

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.

~ Frederick Turner

It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.

~ Salman Rushdie

Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers.

~ Vicki Robin

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.

~ H.g. Wells

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.

~ Bram Stoker

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.

~ Gertrude Stein

Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names.Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal. Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping. Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy. Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not.It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.

~ Pierce Brown

You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.

~ Alan Brown

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.

~ E.b. White

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

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.

~ Ellen Cushing