America Quotes

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

We, in America, love a story – we need a story to get involved in. But then everything becomes more about how the story protects a certain perception as we pick sides.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

To me, America is a symbol of all different views, different types of people coming together.

This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.

There were no second acts in American lives.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors… but always most in the common people.

The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America’s future.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots – after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state – did police departments emerge in the United States.

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word “impossible” is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.[Rien ne saurait étonner un Américain. On a souvent répété que le mot «impossible» n’était pas français; on s’est évidemment trompé de dictionnaire. En Amérique, tout est facile, tout est simple, et quant aux difficultés mécaniques, elles sont mortes avant d’être nées.]

It is likely that America will be more important during the next century or two, but after that it may well be the turn of China.