Quotes
Quotes about America
By the age of twenty, any young man should know whether or not he is to be a specialist and just where his tastes lie. By postponing the question we have set on immaturity a premium which controls most American personality to its deathbed.
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
The striking point about our model family is not simply the compete-compete, consume-consume style of life it urges us to follow. The striking point, in the face of all the propaganda, is how few Americans actually live this way.
The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.
Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.
The big majority of Americans, who are comparatively well off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery without almost noticing them.
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them -which- we are missing.
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.
The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes. . . . It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their "betters" were derelict.
Give the American people a good cause, and there's nothing they can't lick.
It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.
Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.
True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizend of the world: ask not what American will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
The root of the problem is very simply stated: if there were no sovereign independent states, if the states of the civilized world were organized in some sort of federalism, as the states of the American Union, for instance, are organized, there would be no international war as we know it ... The main obstacle is nationalism.
Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?
I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.
"If you don't mind me asking," came the bell-like tones of the Golden Diana, "I'd like to know where you got that City Hall brogue. I did not know that Liberty was necessarily Irish." "If ye'd studied the history of art in its foreign complications, ye'd not need ask," replied Mrs. Liberty, "If ye wasn't so light and giddy ye'd know that I was made by a Dago and presented to the American people on behalf of the French Government for the purpose of welcomin' Irish immigrants into the Dutch city of New York. 'Tis that I've been doing night and day since I was erected."
Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
From the American newspapers you'd think America was populated solely by naked women and cinema stars.
October is a fine and dangerous season in America . . . a wonderful time to begin anything at all.
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object. -Laurence J. Peter.
Good Americans when they die go to Paris.
