Americans Quotes

In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.

Khushwant Singh

...Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years—so typical a place that it only looks like an exception.

Shoot, I must have lived such a doggoned sheltered life as a normal, independent American up there in the Last Frontier, schooled with only public education and a lowly state university degree, because obviously I haven't learned enough to dismiss common sense.

A Bostonian - an American broadly speaking.

G. E. Woodberry

The swaggering underemphasis of New England.

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

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

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.

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

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

Thomas R. Marshall

Pennsylvania the state that has produced two great men: Benjamin Franklin of Massachusetts and Albert Gallatin of Switzerland.

Stormy husky brawling City of the Big Shoulders.

I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.

Willard D. Vandiver

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.

J. K. Galbraith

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what shouldn't be done at all.

Robert H. Gurney

America and its demons Europe and its ghosts.

Le Monde

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Gilbert Millstein

A town that has no ceiling price A town of double-talk A town so big men name her twice Like so: 'N'Yawk N'Yawk.'

Christopher Morley

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.

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

The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.

Ayn Rand

Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

The United States was born in the country and moved to the city in the nineteenth century.

Anonymous

Delaware: a state that has three counties when the tide is out and two when it is in.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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.

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

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came an Indian said simply 'Ours.'

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.

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

America once had the clarity of a pioneer axe.

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

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.

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.

The office of the president is such a bastardized thing half royalty and half democracy that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

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