America Quotes - Page 29

• 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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• That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia.

  Herman Melville

  Australia, Sides, Spheres

  Herman Melville (2008). “Moby-Dick”, p.121, Velvet Element Books

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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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• 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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• The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Important, Demand, Fool

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.91, Verso

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• There is a need for heroism in American life today.

  Vicki Baum

  Life, Time, Role Models

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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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• 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 people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

  John Dos Passos

  Civilization, People, Arms

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• Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.

  Emma Goldman

  Country, Silly, Men

  Emma Goldman (2016). “Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926”, p.57, PM Press

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• I don't think the United States needs superpatriots. We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don't need these people that are more patriotic than you or anyone else.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Patriotic, Thinking, People

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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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• The promise of our country is that the rules are fair. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can earn your share of America's blessings. Those are the beliefs I learned from my parents.

  Geraldine Ferraro

  Country, Hard Work, Blessing

  Vice Presidential Nomination Acceptance Address, delivered 19 July 1984 at the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco

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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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• [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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• The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is sayingit is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.

  Nora Ephron

  Father, Believe, Thinking

  Nora Ephron (1984). “Crazy Salad Plus Nine”

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• The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn't one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.

  Anita Roddick

  Giving, Foundation, Body

  "Family fortunes" by Aida Edemariam, www.theguardian.com. January 17, 2008.

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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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• If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.

  Ishmael Reed

  Brooklyn Bridge, Bridges, Style

  Ishmael Reed (2013). “Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel”, p.18, Open Road Media

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• From the American newspapers you'd think America was populated solely by naked women and cinema stars.

  Nancy Astor

  Stars, Thinking, Naked

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• Few white citizens are acquainted with blacks other than those projected by the media and the so--called educational system, whichis nothing more than a system of rewards and punishments based upon one's ability to pledge loyalty oaths to Anglo culture. The media and the "educational system" are the prime sources of racism in the United States.

  Ishmael Reed

  Loyalty, Education, White

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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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• Every U.S. citizen owes allegiance to our nation. Some Americans consider that anything less than high treason is allegiance.

  Cullen Hightower

  Citizens, Allegiance, Treason

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