Americans Quotes

To Americans, either/or means both.

~ Brian Spellman

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more of their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.

~ Morton Hunt

When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.

~ Karen Chance

You know, if you're an American and you're born at this time in history especially, you're lucky. We all are. We won the world history Powerball lottery.

~ Bill Maher

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

~ Malcolm Cowley

The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.

~ Karl Dönitz

America truly is the best idea for a country that anyone has ever come up with so far. Not only because we value democracy and the rights of the individual, but because we are always our own most effective voice of descent....We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don't like what I say or don't agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I'm glad we're in America, and don't have to oppress each other over it. We're not just a nation, we're not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for a thousand years.

~ Craig Ferguson

Americans are so tightly wound, the way they kill themselves to get ahead. It's no way to live, I tell you.

~ Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.

~ Orson Scott Card

New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.

~ Alison Fell

Americans care more about the rights of animals than about what happens to us!

~ Joe Sacco

The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

~ Aberjhani

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

~ President William J. Clinton

The office of the president is such a bastardized thing half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

~ Jimmy Breslin

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young.

~ Edgar Z. Friedenberg

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.

~ James T. Farrell

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson called New York.

~ O. Henry

Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth that there are no gains without pains.

~ Adlai Stevenson

Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

~ Louis Kronenberger

People who leave Washington D.C. do so by way of the box - ballot or coffin.

~ Claiborne Pell

Poor Mexico so far from God and so near to the United States.

~ Porfirio Diaz

That strange blend of the commercial traveller the missionary and the barbarian conqueror which was the American abroad.

~ Olaf Stapledon

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game ! and lost.

~ Murray Kepton

The President spends most of his time kissing people on the cheek in order to get them to do what they ought to do without getting kissed.

~ Harry S. Truman

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

~ Allen Ginsberg

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned 70 or given up all hope of the Presidency.

~ Wendell Phillips

America is a willingness of the heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

(A country where) the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

~ Oscar Wilde

We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.

~ Earl Warren

Nothing ever gets settled in this town (Washington). It's not like running a company or even a university. It's a seething debating society in which the debate never stops in which people never give up including me and that's the atmosphere in which you administer.

~ George P. Shultz

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

~ Ayn Rand

Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.

~ Jacques Barzun

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

~ Robert Frost

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

~ Murray Kempton

The United States was born in the country and moved to the city in the nineteenth century.

~ Anonymous

Delaware: a state that has three counties when the tide is out and two when it is in.

~ J. J. Ingalls

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

~ Ada Louise Huxtable