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America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
-Ralph Ellison
In African American Wisdom
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In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.
-James T. Farrell
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If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t.
-William Faulkner
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America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.
-Edna Ferber
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To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
-Leslie Fiedler
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There are no second acts in American lives.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
-E. M. Forster
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We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.
-Benjamin Franklin
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America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
-Sigmund Freud
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America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
-Sigmund Freud
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When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.
-Thomas L. Friedman
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
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If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
-Robert Frost
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What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.
-Carlos Fuentes
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I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
-Margaret Fuller
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli used pseudonym Marchioness Ossoli
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America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.
-Martha Graham
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The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.
-Phil Gramm
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Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.
-John Gunther
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America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.
-Warren Harding
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I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.
-Michael S. Harper
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By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of Negro Blood... is a Negro. Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classification; these it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented, as true.
-S. I. Hayakawa
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America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.
-G. W. F. Hegel
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The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
-Eric Hoffer
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Books about America
