American quotes
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Norman Rockwell, the Brueghel of the 20th century bourgeoisie, the Holbein of Jell-O ads and magazine covers; by common assent, the most American artist of all.
American critics are like American universitiesboth have dull and half-dead faculties.
When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter.When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
I am an American,Chicago bornChicago, that somber cityand go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
No other single building is so much a part of the American consciousness.
The world knows the American athlete is superior. It's onlya matter of time before we develop the world's best soccer teams.
We have to be honest, we have to be truthful and speak to the one dirty secret in American life, and that is racism.
Onthis day with high hopesand brave hearts, inmassive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning.
The chief business of the American people is business.
The police dog of American fiction, except that his hatred isnottheresultof mere crabbednessbut of aneye that sees too deep for comfort.
To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofaras we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
The faces of most American women over thirtyare relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.Eachsuburbanwifestruggledwith it alone. Asshe made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at nightshe was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question'Is this all?'
To be an American is an ideal, whileto be a Frenchman is a fact.
College football today is one of the last great strongholds of genuine old-fashioned American hypocrisy.
About the time you are writing a line that you have writtenso oftenthat you wanttothrow up, that isthefirst time the American people will hear it.
He stared the assorted meannesses and failed promises of American life straight in the face, and they stared back.
If I had to give a definition of capitalism, I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.
The propaganda arm of the American Dream machine.
All modernAmericanliterature comesfromonebook by MarkTwain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.
The American system of rugged individualism.
You are white yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That's American.
Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital.Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilitiesitentailsisfighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
The delicate operation of separating an American from the four-wheeled part of him has to be performed with tact.
The best that an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountain top where few have been, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.
Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
The world isaglobal campus,Hilary, you'd betterbelieve it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.
In an English ship, they say, it is poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working populations of both countries.
So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever. 517
When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans.
So bye, bye, Miss American Pie, Drove my Chevy to the levee But the levee was dry. Them good old boys was drinkin' whiskeyand rye Singin' 'This'll be the day that I die.'
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.
All the securityaround the American President is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught.
Roosevelt will probably go down into American history as a great hero. It is one of our Heavenly Father's characteristic jokes upon the American people, and in the usual bad taste.
The greatest of all the contributions of the Americanway of life to the salvation of humanity.
Hiswhole carcassseemedtobemade of iron.There was no give in himno bounce, no softness. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths made of granite.
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Social life ismutual negotiation and society, social order, relies on this mutual negotiation between individuals; this represents both creed and particular reality in American society. In no other society is this creed and the corresponding reality as prominent as the United States.
In giving you these tapes, blemishes and all, I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people.
American people don't believe anything until they see it on television.
Es asombroso ver en que se puede convertir la revolucio n rusa a trave s del cerebro de un comerciante yanqui; basta ver las fotos de las revistas norteamericanas, nada ma s que las fotos porque no se leerlas, para comprender que nohay pueblo ma s imbe cil que e se sobre la tierra; no puede haberlo porque tambie n la capacidad de estupidez es limitada en la raza humana. It's astonishing to see what the Russian Revolution can become thanks to the brain of aYankee entrepreneur; you only have to see the photos in North American magazines, only the photos because I can't read them, to realize they're the most stupid people on earth; that's quite possible because even the human race has a limited potential for idiocy.
There will be a quick rash of hairy American filth, but it shouldn't threaten the existence of decent, serious British filth.
As American as a sawed-off shotgun.
I have got the North Pole out of my system after twenty- three years of effort, hard work, disappointments, hardships, privations, more or less suffering, and some risks The work is the finish, the cap and climax of nearly four hundred years of effort, loss of life, and expenditure of fortunes by the civilized nations of the world, and it has been accomplished in a way that is thoroughly American. I am content.
If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreigntroopwaslanded inmycountry,Inever would lay down my armsnevernevernever!
The pimple on the face of American literature.
The American people do not want their young dying for $1.50 a gallon oil.
The American peoplewere like him: cheerful, optimistic, patriotic, inconsistent, and casually inattentive.
The growth of a large business is merelya survival of the fittest The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. 692
The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech.We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.
The IncomeTax return has made more Liars out of the American people than Golf has. Even when you make one out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a Crook or a Martyr.
I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.
There is a homely adage that runs,'Speak softlyand carry a big stick, and you will go far.' If the American nation will speak softlyand yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actrather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express'an object, actual or imagined.What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
The notion of a defence that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic in the President's vision.
This is the story of the unconquerable fortressthe American home.
You can't figure him out like a fact, because to Reagan themainfact was avision He came fromtheheartland of the country, where people could be down-to-earth yet feel that the sky is the limitnot ashamed of, or cynical about, the American dream.
That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary, and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
Afew weeksago Ihad a revelation and told my secretary that I could give him a synthesis of forty-six years of living with economic policy. It is: 'Economic policy is random with respect to the performance of the American economy, but, thank God, there isn't much of it.'
From the moment she danced with JohnTravolta, she became an honorary American.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at aYearold, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed,Roasted,Baked, or Boiled; and,I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricassee, or a Ragout.
The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
His career was a text book example of the rise of a patrician in the snug embrace of the American establishment.
American men do not read novels because they feel guilty when they read books which do not have facts in them.
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
We are all American at puberty; we die French.
The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since theVietnam War.
The epitaph on the Kennedyadministration became Camelota magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back.
Eisenhower hasa magic in American politics that is peculiarly his: he makes people happy.
What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them. Their first practical leader is an Irish-American.
Nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world; that every people should be left free to determine its own policy, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraidthe little along with the great and powerful. Those are American principles, American policies.We could stand for no others. Theyare also the principles of mankind, and must prevail.
The Versailles of American corporate culture.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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