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Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
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The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.
-Daniel J. Boorstin
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Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.
-Ray Bradbury
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America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
-Louis D. Brandeis
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America is a land where men govern, but women rule.
-John Mason Brown
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Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.
-Art Buchwald
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America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got.
-Charlotte Bunch
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A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
-Edmund Burke
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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.
-Edmund Burke
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America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
-William S. Burroughs
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America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
-William S. Burroughs
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The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle, constantly growing to reach further and include more. Our nation's founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom.
-George W. Bush
Remarks at the 2004 Republican National Convention
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The history of the building of the American nation may justly be described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the problems that will confront the world tomorrow.
-Nicholas Murray Butler
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America is the best half-educated country in the world.
-Nicholas Murray Butler
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America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.
-Willa Cather
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The British have been more up for it than the Americans were, particularly with respect to nudity in the show. In Europe there are adverts that show the breasts, so people are less frightened of that aspect of the show. Americans can withstand incredible violence on TV shows - which, as I come from England and Canada, I find difficult to stomach - but they are more puritanical when it comes to nudity on screen.
-Kim Cattrall, "Sunday Express magazine"
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-Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
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The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
-Raymond Chandler
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It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
-Raymond Chandler
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I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.
-Charlie Chaplin
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America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.
-Ilka Chase
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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
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Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
-Noam Chomsky
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Books about America
