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I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, The trouble with this country is...
-Sinclair Lewis
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Had the King of Spain employed the hands of his people, and his Spanish iron so, he had brought to light but little of that treasure that lay so long hid in the dark entrails of America.
-John Locke
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Of Reason, bk IV, ch. 17., 1690
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To me Americanism means an imperative duty to be nobler than the rest of the world.
-Meyer London
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Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.
-General Douglas MacArthur
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
-Archibald MacLeish
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The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
-Archibald MacLeish
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There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
-Archibald MacLeish
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In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
-Norman Mailer
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There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
-Norman Mailer
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Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.
-Malcolm X
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I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.
-Jacques Maritain
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The Americans who are the most efficient people on earth...have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a...conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider more important matters of big business and fornication.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Cakes and Ale
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America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that's 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We're in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.
-Thomas Mcguane
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People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.
-Margaret Mead
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October is a fine and dangerous season in America...a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful.
-Thomas Merton, Recalled on his death December 10, 1968
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Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
-Henry Miller
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Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.
-Henry Miller
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I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
-Henry Miller
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I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.
-Henry Miller
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We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
-Whitney Moore, Jr.
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There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Family and Nation, 1965
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You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person . . . What America offers me is romanticism and hope . . . Suddenly, I found myself in a country where
-Bharati Mukeriee, In an interview with Bill Moyers, 1990
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Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.
-Martina Navratilova
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Books about America
