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United States Quotes

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United States Quotes

“The President of the United States has super star status. He's not a normal person, because he's protected like no other person in the world and if this man's life is in danger, the whole world is kind of in peril in a way, because the leader of the free world could fall into the hands of terrorists.”

“To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.”

“No man who enters upon the office to which I have succeeded can fail to recognize how every president of the United States has placed special reliance upon his faith in God. Every president has taken comfort and courage when toldthat the Lord 'will be with thee. He will not fail thee nor forsake thee. Fear not-neither be thou dismayed.' Each of our presidents in his own way has placed a special trust in God. Those who were strongest intellectually were also strongest spiritually.”

“Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read.”

“The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than do the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.”

“Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully...they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.”

“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.”

“The way the United States intelligence community operates is it doesn't limit itself to the protection of the homeland. It doesn't limit itself to countering terrorist threats, countering nuclear proliferation. It's also used for economic espionage, for political spying to gain some knowledge of what other countries are doing.”

“All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.”

“We live amid falling taboos. In our crowded little hour of history we have seen how the prejudice of religion no longer can bar the way to the White House. Some of you may live to see the day when the prejudice of sex no longer places the Presidency beyond the reach of a greatly gifted American lady. Long before them, I hope you will see a woman member of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress and in our State Legislatures we need more women to bring their sensitive experience to the shaping of our decisions.”

“Believe it or not, entertainment is part of our American diplomacy, it is part of what makes us exceptional, part of what makes us such a world power. Hundreds of millions of people may never set foot in the United States, but thanks to you, they've experienced a small part of what makes our country special. They've learned something about our values. We have shaped a world culture through you...in a way that has made the world better.”

“America, like Britain before her, is now the great defender of the Status Quo. She has committed herself against revolution and radical change in the underdeveloped world because independent governments would destroy the world economic and political system, which assures the United States its disproportionate share of economic and political power ... America's preeminent wealth depends upon keeping things in the underdeveloped world much as they are, allowing change and modernization to proceed only in a controlled, orderly, and nonthreatening way.”

“I'm deeply grateful to live and work in this country and to the United States for opening its arms to me the way it has. I mean I think my attitude as an Aussie coming here - I've been coming here for a while now, I've been coming here for about 12 or 13 years - is that this country has afforded me and my family work and security. For that, I'm forever grateful.”

“I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before.”

“Early withdrawal from Iraq would result in unarguably, defeat and humiliation for the United States. There's no question. We would be defeated by definition. We would be humiliated in that defeat. I don't think there's any other way to argue it. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is a separate question.”

“Putin is a despot, and he's a very good despot. And he will see things in a narrow way. What is good for Russia? That is what he will do. If that's represented by a move toward the Baltic, that would be very dangerous, but he would do it, on the assumption that he would ask himself the question: I am prepared to fight for Estonia. Is the United States? Is Germany? Is Britain, France?”

“The economic system that the United States has is an evil empire. It's an economic system that's not fair, not just, and it's not democratic. And it will fall just like communism fell. The richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of the wealth. It didn't use to be that way. The average CEO 20 years ago made 20 times as much as the average employee. Now they make 212 times as much.”

“Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We're different people from you and we're different people because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is effected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States.”

“I think we're in a new era where the advancing tide is towards human unity, where people all around the world want to come together. The United States is in a position where it can lead the way towards that and it can do it in practical ways by affirming the power of the United Nations so that the international process makes decisions on international security.”

“The percentage of mentally disturbed people in the United States is very high. From the time the American gets up in the morning, he feels as if someone is trying to influence his will in some way: he is a person with a thousand pressures. The Americans live under a great strain ... and have great feelings of frustration.”

“Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. [...] Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. [...]”

“Once you take yourself off the pedestal, saying, "It's bad for you to torture, but for us, this is our national security, so we're gonna do it". You can't live that way and the United States doesn't need to do it, it shouldn't do it, and I think a Democratic administration, whoever the democratic president is, will repudiate that kind of conduct. I think it was an overreaction caused by a lot of different strains of thought in the administration. I think it was clearly wrong and I think that repudiation, which will come from the United States, will be a key in restoring America's legitimacy.”

“We only have one penal code in the United States, and it applies in every single state, every city, no matter who is there. This is part of the fear mongering, that has gripped the United States, the notion that we need to pass a law forbidding the institution of a foreign Law in the United States when it is forbidden by the constitutions is yet another example of targeting Muslim communities because they are seen as different, or exceptional in other ways.”

“As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.”

“...there are two (inter alia) two ways of ruining a society - namely, letting the market "be the sole director of the fate of human beings," and allowing technology to permeate every aspect of our lives. In the United States, both of these developments have converged, creating a huge chasm between rich and poor and pushing us over the edge into a kind of antisociety... While these developments have been widely hailed as the dawn of a golden age, the likelihood is that they actually amount to a death knell, the beginning of the end of the American empire.”

“Bill Clinton, who, to his credit, has established a clear and consistent foreign policy, which is as follows: Whenever the president of the United States gets anywhere near any foreign head of state, living or dead, he gives that leader a big old hug. This has proven to be an effective way to get foreign leaders to do what we want: Many heads of state are willing to sign any random document that President Clinton thrusts in front of them, without reading it, just so he will stop embracing them.”

“In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. There's something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them.”