American Life Quotes - Page 5

• My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

  Douglas Sirk

  Average, Ideas, People

  8 Copy quote

• Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.

  Warren E. Burger

  Fabric, Crime

  14 Copy quote

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

  Vicki Baum

  Life, Time, America

  14 Copy quote

• There was never a promise that race relations in America would be entirely resolved during my presidency or anybody's presidency. I mean, this has been a running thread - and - and fault line in American life and American politics since its founding.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Mean, Race

  Interview with Jon Sopel on BBC, www.bbc.com. July 24, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are a people of many races, many faiths, creeds, and religions. I do not think that the men who made the Constitution forbade the establishment of a State church because they were opposed to religion. They knew that the introduction of religious differences into American life would undermine the democratic foundations of this country. What holds for adults holds even more for children, sensitive and conscious of differences. I certainly hope that the Board of Education will think very, very seriously before it introduces this division and antagonism in our public schools.

  John Dewey

  Country, Religious, Children

  4 Copy quote

• A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost - Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don't hear a word about it.

  Michael Baumgartner

  War, Dollars, American History

  4 Copy quote

• I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Age, Grew Up, Turbulent Times

  4 Copy quote

• Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Education, College, Men

  7 Copy quote

• The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Views, Argument

  Mary McCarthy (1961). “On the contrary”, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

  Amiri Baraka

  Moving, Reality, Blue

  Imamu Amiri Baraka (1984). “Daggers and javelins: essays, 1974-1979”, William Morrow & Co

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• By the end of the third decade of this century, all of American life - politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive - will be forever transformed by the climate and energy challenge.

  Joseph J. Romm

  Jobs, Home, Car

  4 Copy quote

• In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.

  J. G. Holland

  Children, Home, Men

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 324, 1895.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Within the world of TV land, into which American life has been reduced as well as reproduced, the phenomenon of the talk show has emerged as a genre located somewhere on the spectrum between coffee klatch and town meeting, or perhaps between the psychiatrist's couch and the crowd scene at a bad accident.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Coffee, Land, Towns

  Patricia J. Williams (1995). “The Rooster's Egg”, p.110, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale.He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness.

  Dwight Garner

  Soccer, Teaching, Book

  4 Copy quote

• I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

  Norman Mailer

  Freedom, Feelings, Intellectual

  "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against the liberty of conscience, which is one of the foundations of American life.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Presidential, Church, Liberty

  Theodore Roosevelt (1908). “Americanism in Religion”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The reason given by the President in asking Congress to declare war against Germany is that the German government has declared certain war zones, within which, by the use of submarines, she sinks, without notice, American ships and destroys American lives.

  George W. Norris

  War, Government, President

  6 Copy quote

• Saigon, U.S.A. aptly documents the birth of a new American community, uprooted in the aftermath of war and forever torn apart by the wounds of the past, yet one capable of healing against all odds. An engrossing yet succinct film that captures not only a major incident in Vietnamese American life, but also an important chapter of American history. A profound film that manages to confront us with the deepest sorrow while allowing us to be hopeful about what it means to be human.

  Nguyen Qui Duc

  War, Healing, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.

  Ayad Akhtar

  Religious, Thinking, America

  "Actor-writer Ayad Akhtar". "The Tavis Smiley show", www.pbs.org. April 26, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

  Walter Lippmann

  Loss, Civilization, Class

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

  George Santayana

  Powerful, America, Optimism

  George Santayana (1921). “Character & Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

  Russell Baker

  President, Firsts, Facts

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

  John Lahr

  Dimes, Existential, Changed

  5 Copy quote

• It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.

  Hans Hofmann

  Spiritual, Art, Self

  "Search for the Real: And Other Essays". Book by Hans Hofmann. "Painting and Culture", p. 56, 1948.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life.

  Jackie Kennedy

  Outsiders, Trouble, Hard

  "The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" edited by Bill Adler, 1994.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source