We might start our look at America quotes by asking “What is America?” Is it values that have helped define the nation from its beginning as a collection of 13 colonies? Is this nation called America really the United States, a group of 50 individual governments built on democracy? Is it the landscape? Does geography – mountains, rivers, beaches, trees and valleys – define what America is and what it is not?
Does a person have to be born in America and grow up there to be truly American? If we could answer that question we might have the best idea of just what America is. Many people around the world would say that this country is unique. They say this when they are referring to the U.S. America, to them, is not what some think of as the Western Hemisphere or “the Americas.” If you are truly American you live by a certain set of rules a personal code that directs your life from day to day and from year to year.
But what is that code? Is it the constitution of the country? Is it the laws passed by the legislature in Washington D.C. or the rules enforced by federal authorities? Or, as some would argue, is it an idea? Here are some thoughts on the general subject of America. Explore a collection of inspiring America quotes and sayings that celebrate the essence of the United States.
- America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves – Abraham Lincoln.
- America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair – Arnold Toynbee.
- America, for me, has been the pursuit and catching of happiness – Aurora Raigne.
- America is great because it has as much diversity in geographies as it does in peoples – Aurora Raigne.
- What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise – Barbara Jordan.
- We Americans have no commission from God to police the world – Benjamin Harrison.
- A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election – Bill Vaughan.
- America’s one of the finest countries anyone ever stole – Bobcat Goldthwaite.
- Being an American is a spectator sport – Brock Fiant.
- America is not just a country but a way – Carrie Latet.
- Don’t forget to stop every once in a while and actually thank God for blessing America – he gets a lot of requests, you know – Carrie Latet.
- America is a great big heart attack – Carrie Latet.
- May I never wake up from the American dream – Carrie Latet.
- The American experiment is the most tremendous and far-reaching engine of social change that has ever either blessed or cursed mankind – Charles Francis Adams.
- The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth – Charles Luckman.
- To me, being an American means feeling safe – Currielene Armstrong.
- Only Americans can hurt America – Dwight D. Eisenhower.
- America is the only nation in history that miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization – Georges Clemenceau.
- If you take advantage of everything America has to offer, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish – Geraldine Ferraro.
- America is a tune. It must be sung together – Gerald Stanley Lee.
- There is nothing the matters with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong – G.K. Chesterton.
- America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people – Gloria Steinem.
- If our country is worth dying for in times of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in times of peace – Hamilton Fish.
- I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it – Henry James.
- You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. We are not a nation, so much as a world – Herman Melville.
- What we need are critical lovers of America – patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it – Hubert H. Humphrey.
- We need an America with the wisdom of experience. But we must not let America grow old in spirit – Hubert H. Humphrey.
- America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the crucible, I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races – Israel Zangwill.
- I love America more than any other country in this world; and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually – James Baldwin.
- The United States is the only country with a known birthday – James G. Blaine.
- America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them – James Michener.
- America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true – James T. Farrell.
- I love my freedom. I love my America – Jessi Lane Adams.
- America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, human rights invented America – Jimmy Carter.
- America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas – John Burton Brimer.
- America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy – John Updike.
- America is a country that doesn’t know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there – Laurence J. Peter.
- Not merely a nation but a nation of nations – Lyndon B. Johnson.
- What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it – Margot Asquith.
- America is the only country ever founded on the printed word – Marshall McLuhan.
- America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos – Max Lerner.
- The skies of happiness shine upon these United States of America – Mirakel Reves.
- America is the best half-educated country in the world – Nicholas Murray Butler.
- How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy – Paul Sweeney.
- In America, through the pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from – Peter Alexander Ustinov.
- Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason. Self-examination is not disloyalty – Richard Cardinal Cushing.
- Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian – Robert Orben.
- Americans like fat books and thin women – Russell Baker.
- America is a mistake, a giant mistake – Sigmund Freud.
- This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in – Theodore Roosevelt.
- We sleep peacefully at night, cradled by the big strong hands of America – Val Saintsbury.
- My favorite thing about the United States? Lots of Americans, one America – Val Saintsbury.
- There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America – William J. Clinton.
- If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership – Will Rogers.
- Americans always try to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else – Winston Churchill.
- The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation – Woodrow Wilson.
- Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name – Woodrow Wilson.
- Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world – Woodrow Wilson.
