Great English Quotes and Aphorisms on Americans by famous writers

An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
form of writing raised to the highest level of expressive communication. Carl William Brown

60,000 QUOTES SPIDER

QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON AMERICA 1

America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

Walter Abish (1931-, Teacher, novelist, poet, story writer)

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918, American historian)

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams (1735-1826, American President (2nd))

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888, British poet, critic)

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans.

Ruben Askew (American politician, Florida governor in the 1970’s)

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

Margot Asquith (1864-1945, British socialite)

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973, Anglo-American poet)

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam...

J. G. Ballard (1930-, British author)

America, thou half-brother of the world; with something good and bad of every land.

Philip James Bailey (1816-1902, British poet)

America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin For one dollar and use it up in two weeks.

John Barrymore (1882-1942, American actor)

America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.

Auguste Bartholdi

America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1921, American author)

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887, American preacher, orator, writer)

It is a noble land that God has given us: a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe.

Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927, American senator, orator)

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

Allan Bloom (1930-1992, American educator, author)

The American people, over a period of more than two centuries, have already proved that they are willing to contribute generously of their money and goods to help others.

Landrum R. Bolling

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)

One of the characteristics of American society is its reliance on individual initiative and voluntary action to achieve goals.

Helen Boosalis

America is a land where men govern, but women rule.

John Mason Brown (1800-1859, American militant abolitionist)

America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.

Charlotte Bunch

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797, British political writer, statesman)

Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797, British political writer, statesman)

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997, American writer)

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997, American writer)

As Americans, our purpose is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

George H. Bush (1924-, American President (41st))

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947, American educationist)

The history of the building of the American nation may justly be described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the problems that will confront the world tomorrow.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947, American educationist)

America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.

Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)

Americans usually believe that nothing is impossible.

Lawrence S. Eagleburger

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, American author)

I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977, British comic actor, filmmaker)

America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.

Ilka Chase (1905-1978, American author, actor)

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936, British author)

America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929, French statesman)

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

Bill Clinton (1946-, American President (42nd))

On discovering America: It is the most beautiful land that human eyes have seen. There is no better land or people. They love their neighbors as they do themselves, and their speech is the world's softest; tame, and always with a smile.

Christopher Columbus

The business of America is business and the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933, American President (30th))

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

EE Cummings (1894-1962, American poet)

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

EE Cummings (1894-1962, American poet)

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Don Delillo (1926-, American author)

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870, British novelist)

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

Ernest Dimnet (1866-1954, French clergyman)

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

Bob Dylan (1941-, American musician, singer, songwriter)

The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.

Umberto Eco (1929-, Italian novelist and critic)

There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and even with the European tradition.

Umberto Eco (1929-, Italian novelist and critic)

The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955, German-born American physicist)

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.