A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.
Samuel Butler – Genius, America
Young man, there is America — which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
America – Edmund Burke
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continually. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright.
Bill Bryson – America, instant gratification
America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau – America
We have no desire to be the world’s policeman. But America does want to be the world’s peacemaker.
Jimmy Carter – Peacemaking
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
Jimmy Carter – Melting pot
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 – Ideal, America
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also great literature.
G.K. Chesterton – America, Creed
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde – America
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud – America
The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.
Mark Twain – American, French
I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.
Maya Angelou – American Society
In today’s climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.
Maya Angelou – America
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike – Presidency, America
It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.
