America Quotes - Page 15

To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.

writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an "urban Thoreau") set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of "work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume...

Elizabeth Gilbert

In a stress pressure-cooker like America, I believe we will see more and more shooting massacres. Violence is in our cultural DNA.

Bryant McGill

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

Jess Walter

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Not only was it impossible to truly belong in America, but he didn't fit in here anymore either. He was a dweller of two lands, accepted by none.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I'd learned a few from the Uncles—something about not letting one's shoes touch the kitchen table—but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life there wasn't difficult enough to warrant an adult's belief in magic.

Sara Nović

Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.

Cornel West

Prejudice in this country is like chapters in a book. Chapter One: Hating the Africans and Indians. Chapter Two: Don't forget the Irish. Chapter Three: Polish jokes."..... "Hispanics? Latinos? Whatever you call us? Maybe we're Chapter Fifteen or Sixteen on the East Coast, but we're the preface in the West.

Emilie Richards

Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.

Colin Quinn

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Jennifer Egan

America, the plum blossoms are falling.

Allen Ginsberg

Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.But Americans, I think, have a great advantage. To renew our unity, we only need to remember our values. We have never been held together by blood or background. We are bound by things of the spirit – by shared commitments to common ideals.

George W. Bush

Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I've written.

Stephen King

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that’s the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.

Robert M. Pirsig

Guns give Evil a means to expression.

Jonathan Heatt

The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas. Thus we euro-americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come only from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history.

Pascal Bruckner

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty

John F Kennedy

There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor.

Marilynne Robinson

The secret strength of a nation is found in the faith that abides in the hearts and homes of the country.

Billy Graham

We talk out of both corners of our mouth at once. We say we are a Christian nation, but much of our literature, our social practices, our deep interests are not Christian at all. They are totally secular.

Billy Graham

Spiritually, we have wandered far from the faith of our fathers . . . no nation which relegates the Bible to the background, which disregards the love of God and flouts the claims of the Man of Galilee, can long survive.

Billy Graham

No form of government has been able to establish righteousness, justice, and peace, the three elements without which we can never have continued national prosperity or international peace.

Billy Graham

Our government is certainly going to fall like a rope of sand if unsupported by the moral fabric of God’s Word. The moral structure in our country grew from Judeo-Christian roots. When those values are applied, they produce moral fruits. But if that structure disappears, the moral sentiment that shapes our nation’s goals will disappear with it.

Billy Graham

America has probably been the most successful experiment in history. The American Dream was a glorious attempt. It was built on a religious foundation. Its earliest concepts came from Holy Scripture.

Billy Graham

You can put a public school and university in the middle of every block of every city in America—but you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.

Billy Graham

I believe America has gone a long way down the wrong road. If we ever needed God’s help, it is now.

Billy Graham

God honored and blessed America as few nations in history. However, in recent years the nation has been moving away from its religious heritage.

Billy Graham

America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest variety and greatest number of artificial amusements of any country. People have become so empty that they can’t even entertain themselves.

Billy Graham

A terrifying spiritual and moral tide of evil has already loosed us from our spiritual moorings. Monstrous new ideas that could easily destroy our freedoms are rushing into the vacuum.

Billy Graham

Nations rise, they flourish for a time, and then they decline. Eventually every empire comes to an end; not even the greatest can last forever.

Billy Graham

There is no doubt that nations come to an end when they have ceased to fulfill the function that God meant for them.

Billy Graham

We have so many battles going on in America today that we should be a people of prayer. Our government needs prayer. Our leaders need prayer. Our schools need prayer. Our youth need our prayers. Our families need our prayers.

Billy Graham

America’s Declaration of Independence speaks of “the pursuit of happiness,” but nowhere in the Bible are we told to pursue this. Happiness is elusive, and we don’t find it by seeking it.

Billy Graham

Just as America has grown and prospered within the framework of our Constitution, so Christianity has flourished and spread according to the laws set forth in the Bible.

Billy Graham

The Pilgrims . . . put their ideals ahead of all material considerations. It is not surprising that the Pilgrims had little and succeeded, while we have much and are in danger of failing. No civilization can make progress unless some great principle is generously mixed into the mortar of its foundations in life.

Billy Graham

The Pilgrims had vision and hope because they lived in the dimension of eternity. Their strength of spirit was forged by a personal faith in God, by tough discipline, and by regular habits of devotion.

Billy Graham

Our nation grew strong in an era when moral standards were emphasized, and it will grow weak when we condone that which we once condemned.

Billy Graham

The nation’s image has become more like a chameleon—accepting whatever trend marketers concoct. Gone are the days of reverencing a holy God in the church or within ourselves. Yet the Bible tells us, “Happy is the man who is always reverent” (Proverbs 28:14 NKJV).

Billy Graham

What I find disturbing in America is the consuming desire for leisure, convenience, and fun. It seems we, as a nation, have traded God for gadgets. We have traded eternal truth for momentary self-gratification—worshipping false gods of materialism and humanism instead of the Creator of all things.

Billy Graham

As long as we are on this earth, we possess dual citizenship. On one hand we owe allegiance to our nation and are called to be good citizens. But we are also citizens of the kingdom of God. Our supreme loyalty is to Him.

Billy Graham

All the nations that make up the world are burdened down with riches or poverty, obesity or malnutrition, success or failure.

Billy Graham

At the bitter end of an era of liberation—women’s lib, kids’ lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib—America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.

Billy Graham

The great flaw in the American economic system has finally been revealed: an unrealistic faith in the power of prosperity rather than in the ultimate power and benevolence of God.

Billy Graham

No matter how hard we try, words simply cannot express the horror, the shock, and the revulsion we all feel over what took place in this nation on 9/11. My prayer today is that we will feel the loving arms of God wrapped around us, and will know in our hearts that He will never forsake us as we trust in Him.

Billy Graham

The blood of Christ “purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9 NIV).

Billy Graham

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

Harold Edmund Stearns

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

Robert M. Pirsig

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.

Jon Stewart

From where would failed Americans leap if all of our towering buildings were razed to the ground? He envisions inflated airfares to Niagara Falls; renewed interest in the nations dams and gorges; long lines at the Grand Canyon, potential suicides being asked to take a numbered ticket, to wait their turn. Couldn't Al Qaeda see that we are killing our own well enough? Competitive society creates deep-rooted feelings of failure. On our own we succeed at self-termination; America needs no foreign aid from these murderers.

Alex Kudera

We are oblivious to suffering. We are cheap with charity if it's not close to our home.

Bill Maher

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Janet Fitch

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.

Hunter S. Thompson

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.

John Steinbeck

4-19-10 Monday 1:00 P.M. Today the gas was turned off – more panic reactions. I’m wondering if the darkest hour is just before the dawn and all those wonderful cliches. I don’t see anyway out of my current situation, at least any quality of life I’m willing to accept. It’s just too much to think about right now. I lost the gas stove, the heat, and the water heater. Hmm cold showers, but found an electric crock pot and frying pan, and I still have the microwave. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose the water. My mother told me there’s a family who pitched a tent in the forest preserve. Somehow the father’s still working and keeping his two kids in school, with a little help from a local church. And it’s good to know the forest rangers have a heart and have looked the other way. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they’ve dropped off some food and supplies. Isn’t that America.

Andrew Neff

There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

James Baldwin

Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America--we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.

Stephen Colbert

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

Geoffrey Wood

Dreher laments we now live in a “post-Christian” America, but he’s wrong. The Americans who are standing with their loved ones and neighbors are in fact doing exactly what Jesus asked them to do, when he said that we should love each other as we love ourselves. It’s possible, however, that we live in a post-accepting-bigotry-cloaking-itself-in-the-raiments-of-Christ America. And, you know. I can live in that America just fine.

John Scalzi

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America Quotes - Page 15

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