Quotes by American Authors - Page 210

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.
Murray Kempton
Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.
Robert Frost
Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
Jacques Barzun
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
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
America is a willingness of the heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.
Allen Ginsberg
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
People who leave Washington D.C. do so by way of the box - ballot or coffin.
Claiborne Pell
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
Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth that there are no gains without pains.
Adlai Stevenson
If you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully
Abraham Lincoln
If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson called New York.
o.henry
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
Part of the American dream is to live long and die young.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
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
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
President William J. Clinton
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power a little transient fame A grave to rest in and a fading name!
William Winter
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When tillage begins other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster
I have learned little from the years that fly but I have wrung the colour from the years.
Frances Pollock
They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.
Malcolm Cowley
If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
We grow neither better nor worse as we get old but more like ourselves
May Lamberton Becker
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things aren't what they used to be I always forget to include myself.
George Burns
Every man who has lived his life to the full should by the time his senior years are reached have established a reserve inventory of unfinished thinking.
Clarence Randall
Senescence begins And middle age ends The day your descendants Outnumber your friends.
Ogden Nash
Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this too shall pass!'
Eleanor Roosevelt
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.
T.S Eliot
How beautifully the leaves grow old. How full of light and colour are their last days.
John Burroughs
I am long on ideas but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years.
Thomas A. Edison
It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child while not being loved as a child is loved but merely being kept alive against one's will.
Malcolm Cowley
I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old - many people don't have that privilege.'
Earl Warren
Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
No gains without pains.
Adlai Stevenson
The arctic loneliness of age.
S. Weir Mitchell
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Many a man that couldn't direct ye to th' drug store on th' corner when he was thirty will get a respectful hearin' when age has further impaired his mind.
Finley Peter Dunne
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
Will Durant
He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
I really believe that more harm is done by old men who cling to their influence than by young men who anticipate it.
Owen D. Young
To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Bernard Baruch
I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.
Robert Frost
One trouble with growing older is that it gets progressively tougher to find a famous historical figure who didn't amount to much when he was your age.
Bill Vaughan
Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.
George Santayana
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp
How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?
Satchel Paige
A man of fifty looks as old as Santa Claus to a girl of twenty.
William Feather
The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.
T.S Eliot
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
It is time to be old To take in sail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you live long enough the venerability factor creeps in you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.
I.F. Stone
Middle age: when you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
Ogden Nash