A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Americans live under the delusion that enterprise here is both private and free. It may be nominally private, but it's anything but free. Unfortunately, most people don't know what freedom is. So they are unfazed when they hear that before you can do anything of a commercial nature, you need government permission.”
“Americans live with the certain knowledge that the source of their greatness has not yet been released.”
“Americans long thought that nature could take care of itself-or that if it did not, the consequences were someone else's problem. As we know now, that assumption was wrong; none of us is a stranger to environmental problems.”
Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1977
“Americans long to be united. After 9/11, we all just wanted to be one nation. Not a single American on September the 12, 2001, cared who won the next presidential election.”
“Americans lose more of their property to civil asset forfeiture than they do to criminals.”
Source: Cooperation and Coercion: How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What that Means for Economics and Politics
“Americans’ love affair with television and tabloid journalism, along with their constant immersion in the vast offerings of the media and the Internet’s dynamic communication mechanism operates to distinguish the American psyche from that of other nationalities. The onslaught of visual information available to Americans operates to deaden their innate curiosity of the natural world and to numb their interior world. Instead of exploring nature and ideas, Americans demonstrate a proclivity to scan headlines, watch television and films, and surf the Webb in order passively to partake in cultural events. The immense amount of social and political news that the average citizen takes in is bound to reduce the attention span of Americans, especially citizens devoted to celebrity watching, the distinctive American obsession of ogling the film, television, music, and sport stars whom draw media attention and captivate the public of each generation.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.”
“Americans love our shoes and us Brits love that we can always pick up a bargain when in the US.”
“Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."”
“Americans love their captivity. There's no responsibility. When you're a captive, you don't have to make a decision about anything, though you have no Liberty. People don't want Liberty. Liberty is nothing but uncertainty. It's much easier to have someone tell you where you'll be, what you'll do and who you'll pay tomorrow than to worry about it yourself. The same goes for what you think”
“Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.”
“Americans love to hear good things about their bad habits.”
Source: The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health
“Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.”
“Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.”
Source: Enchantment
“Americans love to read about violence.”
“Americans love to talk about the Constitution and how it protects the rights of every citizen and promises freedom to every citizen, but it's also a country based on racism and they don't talk about that too much and every time there's a film which deals with it there's certain parts of the country that feel uncomfortable.”
“Americans love to talk—and fight—about sex.”
Source: Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America
“Americans love winners, so if we win we know we'll get a lot of support.”
“Americans make money by playing `money games,' namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth ... instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value.”
“Americans may be drinking fewer alcoholic beverages, but they are certainly eating more of them than ever before. Wittingly or un.”
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
Source: America
“Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.”
Source: It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future : a Nonfiction Collection
“Americans must either choose big government and be willing to pay for and submit to it, or they must move toward smaller, less intrusive government and be willing to enjoy fewer government programs.”
“Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.”
“Americans need a fresh reminder of the amazing nation they have and the power of liberties I see so often taken for granted.”
Source: Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes
“Americans need accurate information in order to consider Social Security reform. Too bad the media can't be counted upon to provide it.”
“Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They've become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can't survive without it.”
Source: The Best of Michael Moorcock
“Americans need help understanding their world now more than ever. [TV] believes it's filled its obligation to the public because it's presented both sides. But most of what we're living through now has multiple sides, and those sides, if you take the extreme oppositional views, have to be brought together for people to make a decision about how to act on the information.”
“Americans need not fear the federal government because they enjoy the advantage of being armed, which you possess over the people of almost every other nation.”
“Americans need rest, but do not know it.”
Source: Sceptical Essays
“Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.”
Source: Sceptical Essays
“Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values.”
“Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”
“Americans need to see people who are honestly trying to learn from each other, even as we make our own points powerfully and fight for our own values and policies.”
“Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with Washington's huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet. Washington is the enemy of all humanity.”
“Americans need to understand the significance of having their civil liberties dismantled. It doesn't just affect terrorists and foreigners, it affects us all.”
“Americans need to worry about whether Donald Trump will be watching out for America's bottom line or his own bottom line.”
“Americans need to worry about whether Trump will be watching out for America's bottom line or his own bottom line.”
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.”
“Americans of all ages are earning less than they did two decades ago when adjusted for inflation. Yet they’re paying more in taxes.”
“Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types-religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute....At the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.”
Source: Democracy in America
“Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”
“Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.”
Source: Half the Sky
“Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.”
Source: Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62
“Americans of our own time - minority and majority Americans alike - need the continued guidance that the Voting Rights Act provides. We have come a long way, but more needs to be done.”
“Americans of today have inherited these distorted rules of engagement whether or not their families had enslaved people or had even been in the United States.”
Source: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Americans often did not realize that their Marine Corps was a force without counterpart in the world. European navies used Marines for limited duties on shipboard or in naval bases, but neither the numbers nor the training were provided for large-scale offensive operations.”
“Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment.”
“Americans once believed that their prosperity and way of life depended on having assured access to Persian Gulf oil. Today, that is no longer the case. The United States is once more an oil exporter. Available and accessible reserves of oil and natural gas in North America are far greater than was once believed. Yet the assumption that the Persian Gulf still qualifies as crucial to American national security persists in Washington. Why?”