A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”
“America is a giving nation and very compassionate.”
“America is a great country, but like every other nation on earth, it is influenced by evil. John Wilkes Booth epitomizes the evil that can harm us, even as President Abraham Lincoln represents the good that can make us stronger.”
“America is a great country. We have a lot to be proud of, and a lot to look forward to being proud of. But let's not ever forget to look back into the past, learn from it, and embrace it, for to deny the past is a dark path to go down.”
Source: An Absolute Mind
“America is a great country, and we've done a lot of good in the world. But we are a collection of people, not saints. We have our own sins to atone for.”
“America is a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.”
“America is a great country. I've been in the south, in the center and in the north. I like it. Americans are very good people. There's just too much air-conditioning.”
“America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it's tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn't solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it's still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?”
“America is a great country. We are so wealthy. But our one remaining challenge is to fulfill the potential of all our people. And the only way we can do that is to try to bring everybody together to a higher place.”
“America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.”
“America is a great place, speech is free and you're able to expose the fact that you're an idiot.”
“America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.”
“America is a huge country, of course. It's complicated. There's good, and there's not so good, and that's the same wherever you live.”
“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”
“America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power.”
“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.”
“America is a land of creators and rebels.”
“America is a land of healthy appetites. It is not in the American character to live in order to eat. Rather, the reverse is true. Many try, but just as Americans don't make good gigolos, nether do they make good gourmets.”
“America is a land of opportunity and don't ever forget it.”
Source: Will Rogers' Daily Telegrams: The Hoover years, 1931-1933
“America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.”
Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times
“America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.”
Source: Democracy In America -- Vol. 1
“America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not attempted to do. - from Democracy in America”
Source: Democracy in America
“America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy - and wont cross the street to vote in a national election.”
“America is a land where men govern, but women rule.”
“America is a large country and its people have so far not shown much interest in great international problems, among which the problem of disarmament occupies first place today. This must be changed, if only in America's own interest. The last war has shown that there are no longer any barriers between the continents and that the destinies of all countries are closely interwoven. The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round.”
“America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”
“America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share.
This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule.”
Source: On the Rez
“America is a lunatic asylum.”
“America is a melting pot for all different groups of people, historically. And it's rare that the story of all of these people will be told in the history books. So I always felt I had to find out my history for myself and research my roots.”
“America is a melting pot of immigrants. So actually, if you took all of the immigrants outside of America, you'd be missing a lot of flavor, starting with the food, with the culture, with the dance, with everything.”
“America is a melting pot, and education has been a mainspring for our democracy and freedom, a means of providing gifts of knowledge and opportunity to all citizens, no matter how humble their background, so they could climb higher, help build the American dream, and leave a better life for those who follow.”
Source: Ronald Reagan
“America is a mere bully, from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.”
“America is a miracle country.”
“America is a miracle country. And we have to restore the sense that the Amiracle (ph) will apply to you. Each and every one of the people in this country who's watching tonight, lift everybody, unite everybody and build a stronger United States of America again. It will be and can be done.”
“America is a mistake, a giant mistake.”
“America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.”
“America is a model of force and freedom and moderation - with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.”
“America is a nation created by all the hopeful wanderers of Europe, not out of geography and genetics, but out of purpose.”
Source: The Making of the President 1960
“America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.”
Source: Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier
“America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?”
Source: Wild Ducks Flying Backward
“America is a nation of immigrants who forgot where they came from and poor people who think they'll soon be rich.”
“America is a nation of immigrants, and we should treat those who come to our country with dignity and respect.”
“America is a nation of immigrants. And so the question is, how do we make legal immigration faster, less bureaucratic, cut the red tape?”
“America is a nation of immigrants. We have to have a functioning immigration system.”
“America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.”
Source: The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World
“America is a nation of prayer. It's impossible to tell the story of our nation without telling the story of people who pray.”
“America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.”
“America is a nation that is founded on the principle of religious freedom. That is the reason this country exists.”
“America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”
“America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.”
Source: The Quality of Life