A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.”
“Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.”
Source: Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
“Americans have a strange notion that the ordinary laws of economics do not apply to them. So doubtless they will think they are prosperous if the boom starts, and that deficits and indebtedness are merely signs of how prosperous they are.”
“Americans have a taste for…rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased.”
“Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.”
“Americans have a warrior's mentality, most of them. That's how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.”
Source: Conversations with Isabel Allende
“Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in.”
“Americans have always believed that-within the law-all kinds of people should be allowed to take the initiative in all kinds of activities. And out of that pluralism has come virtually all of our creativity. Freedom is real only to the extent that there are diverse alternatives.”
“Americans have always built for the future. That is why we established land grant colleges and passed the Homestead Act to open our Western lands more than 100 years ago.”
Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966
“Americans have always evinced some distrust of government, but the current situation has exacerbated this to a degree that may be unprecedented.”
“Americans have always excelled through hard work, innovation, and an ability to find solutions that makes us unique among nations.”
“Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward intelligence. When they feel threatened, they want a lot of it, and when they don't, they regard the whole thing as somewhat immoral.”
“Americans have always had innovators and entrepreneurs who built real companies and create real value, but we should not and we will not respect those who get rich by cheating everybody else.”
“Americans have always held firm, because we have always believed in certain truths. We know that if evil is not confronted, it gains in strength and audacity and returns to strike us again. We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat, it is courage. And we know that a great ideal of human freedom entrusted to us in a special way and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending.”
“Americans have always pursued our dreams within a free market that has been the engine of our progress. It's a market that has created a prosperity that is the envy of the world, and rewarded the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon of science, and technology, and discovery. But the American economy has worked in large part because we have guided the market's invisible hand with a higher principle - that America prospers when all Americans can prosper. That is why we have put in place rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest.”
“Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It's a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.”
“Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.”
Source: I take great pleasure
“Americans have an expectation that the Postal Service will abide by its well-known, although unofficial, motto - a commitment to deliver.”
“Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.”
Source: Virtuous Reality: How America Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits, and Blockheads Like William Bennett
“Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.”
“Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted. I think a lot of women are contained within the parentheses of shoulds and role-play. It's all about entitlement and history. It's all about upper-body strength - and exacting your will.”
“Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we're simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
“Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”
“Americans have been given goals to achieve in Iraq, but not the standards by which to measure progress. And the only assurance Americans have been given that we can reach those goals is to trust the President and his Administration at their word.”
“Americans have been good at improvising for a long time, but in the last few decades, we have gotten very sloppy about the rote memorization of facts. That's a discipline issue. You need the rote skill in order to have something to improvise off of, otherwise you are simply playing air guitar.”
“Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.”
“Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property.”
“Americans have been slow to identify mediocrity because mediocre art simultaneously embraces virtues which both progressives and conservatives hold dear. In order to condemn mediocrity, one must believe that surviving the test of time is a very reliable sign of goodness, and very few persons on the political left would agree to this premise. However, condemning mediocrity also depends upon admitting that, regardless of other boons it might offer society, capitalism has not been good for art, and very few conservatives would admit this.”
Source: Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
“Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.”
“Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race or people, barbaric or civilized”
“Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie.”
Source: On call: political essays
“Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.”
“Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re worth in the market, without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. This tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable.”
Source: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
“Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.”
“Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.”
“Americans have discovered fear.”
“Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.”
“Americans have eliminated Iran's worst enemies, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam [Hussein]. I occasionally threatened my Iranian counterpart in Kabul that one day I would send him a big bill for what we did. But, seriously, Iran is pursuing a dual strategy in Iraq. On the one hand, the Iranians, after decades of hostility, are now interested in good relations. On the other hand, they want to keep the country weak and dominate the region.”
“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”
“Americans have freer access to more information than at any other time in the history of our country. What happened when we let loose on that landscape of possibility? People raised their voices, louder all the time, and the boundaries of the landscape we had known wore down as volumes rose. The country started seeming like a village in a folktale under a spell, where the more the people see the less they know”
Source: The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
“Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.”
“Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace and it's got to be fixed.”
“Americans have gotten to know Sarah Palin. They know that she's a role model to women and other - and reformers all over America. She's a reformer.”
“Americans have grown impatient with the relentless politicizing of every area of life.”
“Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.”
“Americans have learned to trust free markets. Republican or Democrat, we believe the unimpeded exchange of goods and services will yield better solutions than five-year plans set by even the most well-meaning public servants.”
“Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.”
“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.”
Source: How to Be an Antiracist
“Americans have long felt that NATO isn't doing its job and that the Europeans aren't contributing enough. Trump has accelerated the decline in Atlantic solidarity by offering open contempt for NATO allies as well. The future of NATO now very much depends on Europeans. Can you begin to identify security threats, prepare yourselves and arm yourselves without the US?”