Americans Quotes

The Americans believe they answered all first questions in 1776: since then they've just been hammering out the practical details.

~ Ray Smith

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

~ Lewis Mumford

Americans have a special horror of letting things happen their own way without interference. They would like to jump down their stomachs digest the food and shovel the shit out.

~ William Burroughs

In the United States 'First' and 'Second' class can't be painted on railroad cars for all passengers being Americans are equal and it would be 'unAmerican.' But paint 'Pullman' on a car and everyone is satisfied.

~ Owen Wister

The true America is the Middle West and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.

~ W. L. George

America once had the clarity of a pioneer axe.

~ Robert Osborn

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.

~ Gertrude Stein

You say to your soldier 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American 'This is why you ought to do this' and then he does it.

~ Baron Von Steuben

The greatest American superstition is belief in facts.

~ Hermann Keyserling

America should care more for its poor and reform itself in other ways but even if it won't do those things it remains the least constrained society on earth.

~ Robert M. Adams

Florida: God's waiting room.

~ Glenn Le Grice

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

~ John Updike

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

~ H. L. Mencken

Good Americans when they die go to Paris.

~ Thomas Gold Appleton

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

~ Stephen Leacock

The American's conversation is much like his courtship ... He gives an inkling and watches for a reaction if the weather looks fair he inkles a little more. Wishing neither to intrude nor be intruded upon he advances by stages of acceptance by levels of agreement by steps of concurrence.

~ Donald Lloyd

The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.

~ June Callwood

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

~ V. S. Pritchett

New York is notoriously inhospitable to the past disowning it whenever it can.

~ John D. Rosenberg

Why if you're not in New York you are camping out.

~ Thomas W. Dewing

That enfabled rock that ship of life that swarming million-footed tower-masted sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan.

~ Thomas Wolfe

I don't like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick.

~ Nikita Khrushchev

New York the nation's thyroid gland.

~ Christopher Morley

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great big vulgar bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

~ Harold Macmillan

As for what you're calling hard luck - well we made New England out of it. That and codfish.

~ Stephen Vincent Benét

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere it is not this sort of licence that distinguishes New York. It is rather a lust of the total ego for recognition even for eminence. More than elsewhere everybody here wants to be Somebody.

~ Sydney J. Harris

After twenty annual visits I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.

~ Cecil Beaton

He speaks English with the flawless imperfection of a New Yorker.

~ Gilbert Millstein

And this is good old Boston The home of the bean and the cod - Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots And the Cabots talk only to God.

~ J. C. Bossidy

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its predicted end ... it is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization the first permanent civilization in America.

~ Bernard De Voto

A Bostonian - an American broadly speaking.

~ G. E. Woodberry

The swaggering underemphasis of New England.

~ Heywood Broun

A well-established village in New England or the northern Middle-West could afford a town drunkard a town atheist and a few Democrats.

~ D. W. Brogan

I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachussets she needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves.

~ Daniel Webster

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

~ Joseph Wood Krutch

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

~ George Santayana

America - the best poor man's country in the world.

~ William Allen

Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.

~ E. M. Forster

I'm from Indiana the home of more first-rate second-class men than any other state in the union.

~ Thomas R. Marshall