quotations about America
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Ideas that Have Harmed Mankind", Unpopular Essays
America must be a light to the world, not just a missile.
NANCY PELOSI
response to President Bush's 2004 State of the Union Address
Despite what you hear, we don't need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great.
HILLARY CLINTON
"Super Tuesday Post-Mortem: If Hillary Thinks America Is Still Great, She Needs To Get Out More", Forbes, March 2, 2016
Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today--with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jan. 3, 2008
America is a conservative country with a small "c" - they want change, but they don't want too much change too fast.
HOWARD DEAN
speech, Mar. 6, 2004
America should do a reverse Columbus. The world no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to discover the world's view of America.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
"Americans need to discover how the world sees them", The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2013
As you know, the founding fathers were not a multicultural group. There were no women, no Native Americans, no blacks, and virtually no poor people.
HOWARD ZINN
Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches, 1963-2009
If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Congress's Shameful Retreat from American Values", The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 4, 2006
What America surely needs now is a return to those original ideals that have been the sources of her greatness.... America's need, and the world's need, today, is a new burst of American [creative] pioneering, and this time not just within the confines of a single continent but all round the globe.
ARNOLD TOYNBEE
Widening Horizons in Creativity
You know, this country today, it seems to me--it's about fear. And it shouldn't be about fear. It should be about hope and optimism and creativity and accepting a challenge and being a moral leader and being a great nation.
TOM VILSACK
speech, Oct. 12, 2006
America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
SIGMUND FREUD
attributed, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud: Years of Maturity
Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their f***ing skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!
BILL HICKS
Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
MALCOLM X
speech at Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio, "The Ballot or the Bullet", Apr. 3, 1964
It is said that a few people immigrated to America in search of God, but the overwhelming majority of immigrants came in search of gold.
MAHMUD IMARA
"America for Sale", America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature
It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
America ... it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
THOMAS WOLFE
Of Time and the River
We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.
JOE BIDEN
speech in Wilmington, Delaware, June 10, 1987
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jun. 4, 2005