America Quotes - Page 19

• One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

  George Santayana

  Ideas, Bye, Feelings

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.8, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other is, or can be) the true American one.

  Herman Melville

  Spirit, Western

  Herman Melville (2015). “Israel Potter: Works of Melville”, p.146, 谷月社

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• In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild, but that letters and newspapers arrive at least once a week.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Cabins, Valleys, Michigan

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• In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Children, Work, Animal

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• A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Home, Exhibitions, Way

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• The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Europe, Rift, Gaps

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• A turning point in modern history.

  Robert Frost

  History, Modern, Turning Points

  Robert Frost (1975). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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• Every gathering of Americans-whether a few on the porch of a crossroads store or massed thousands in a great stadium-is the possessor of a potentially immeasurable influence on the future.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Gathering, Influence, Crossroads

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• European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

  James A. Baldwin

  Class, Choices, Intellectual

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• I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.

  Ishmael Reed

  Fall, Race, Ideas

  Ishmael Reed (1982). “God made Alaska for the Indians: selected essays”, Scholarly Title

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• [Wellesley College] is about as meaningful to the educational process in America as a perfume factory is to the national economy.

  Nora Ephron

  Meaningful, Educational, College

  Nora Ephron (1991). “Nora Ephron Collected”

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• We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.

  Jimmy Carter

  Faith, Confidence, Important

  Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence, delivered 15 July, 1979

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• If we don't want to see the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now.

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Sea, Borders

  Reagan, Ronald (1988). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1986”, p.297, Best Books on

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• The President is not only the leader of a party, he is the President of the whole people. He must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.

  Herbert Hoover

  Party, People, Leader

  Hoover, Herbert (1974). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Herbert Hoover, 1929”, p.554, Best Books on

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• Never, I say, had a country so many openings to happiness as this.... Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal. Her temper serene and firm.... The remembrance then of what is past, if it operates rightly must inspire her with the most laudable of an ambition, that of adding to the fair fame she began with. The world has seen her great adversity.... Let then, the world see that she can bear prosperity; and that her honest virtue in time of peace is equal to the bravest virtue in time of war.

  Thomas Paine

  Country, War, Adversity

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• Men of widely divergent views in our own country live in peace together because they share certain common aspirations which are more important than their differences.... The common responsibility of all Americans is to become effective, helpful participants in a way of life that blends and harmonizes the fiercely competitive demands of the individual and society.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Country, Responsibility, Men

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• Gerald Ford was unknown throughout America. Now he's unknown throughout the world.

  Groucho Marx

  Success, World, Gerald Ford

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• The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Men, Thinking, Make You Think

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• In the mighty and almost limitless potential of American industry-the brilliance and rugged determination of its leaders; the skill, energy and patriotism of its workers-there has been welded an almost impregnable defense against the evil designs of any who would threaten the security of the American continent. It is indeed the most forceful and convincing argument yet evolved to restrain the irresponsibility of those who would recklessly bring down upon the good and peace-loving peoples of all the nations of the earth the disaster of total war.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Determination, War, Skills

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• We are America.
  We are the coffin fillers.
  We are the grocers of death.
  We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

  Anne Sexton

  United States, Coffins, Cauliflower

  Anne Sexton, “The Firebombers”

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• The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

  Margaret Mead

  Success, People, Today

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• ...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Hero, Thoughtful, Thinking

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• And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to
  prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
  You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we
  cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Freedom, Passion, Luxury

  Robinson Jeffers, Albert Gelpi (2003). “The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers”, p.154, Stanford University Press

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• Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.

  William Carlos Williams

  Giving, Literature, Matter

  William Carlos Williams (1956). “In the American Grain”, p.216, New Directions Publishing

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• I sincerely hope that the incoming Congress will be alive, as it should be, to the importance of our foreign trade and of encouraging it in every way feasible. The possibility of increasing this trade in the Orient, in the Philippines, and in South America is known to everyone who has given the matter attention.

  William Howard Taft

  Attention, Alive, Matter

  William Howard Taft, David Henry Burton (2004). “The Collected Works of William Howard Taft: Presidential addresses and state papers”

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