Across The Clear Blue Yonder, Sea To Shining Sea

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.  ~James Michener

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

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

America is a tune.  It must be sung together.  ~Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds

What is the essence of America?  Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from."  ~Marilyn vos Savant, in Parade

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.  ~Norman Thomas

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

What the people want is very simple.  They want an America as good as its promise.  ~Barbara Jordan

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.  ~William J. Clinton

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.  ~Elmer Davis

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing.  America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.  ~Max Lerner, Actions and Passions, 1949

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

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

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea.  He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.  ~Adlai Stevenson

If you take advantage of everything America has to offer, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.  ~Geraldine Ferraro

We dare not forget that we are the heirs of that first revolution.  ~John F. Kennedy

America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.  ~Abraham Lincoln

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States.  Ask any Indian.  ~Robert Orben

Of all the supervised conditions for life offered man, those under U S A's constitution have proved the best.  Wherefore, be sure when you start modifying, corrupting or abrogating it.  ~Martin H. Fischer

America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.  ~Bobcat Goldthwaite

We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls.  ~Robert J. McCracken

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."  ~Vine Deloria, Jr.

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.  ~John Gunther

Not merely a nation but a nation of nations.  ~Lyndon B. Johnson

What we need are critical lovers of America - patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it.  ~Hubert H. Humphrey

The United States is the only country with a known birthday.  ~James G. Blaine

Oh, it's home again and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea
To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
~Henry Van Dyke

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.  ~Will Rogers

If you can speak three languages you're trilingual.  If you can speak two languages you're bilingual.  If you can speak only one language you're an American.  ~Author Unknown

America is a large friendly dog in a small room.  Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.  ~Arnold Toynbee

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.  ~Georges Clemenceau

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 a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.  ~Margot Asquith

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.  ~Walter Lippman

Rachel:  The pilgrims came here to escape persecution from the British.
Elizabeth:  Yes, so they could go about persecuting the Indians.
~ER, "Great Expectations"

Aborigines, n.:  Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country.  They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.  ~Benjamin Harrison, address to Congress, 1888

America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas.  ~John Burton Brimer

The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading.  A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.  ~Carl N. Degler

America did not invent human rights.  In a very real sense... human rights invented America.  ~Jimmy Carter

What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public.  ~From the movie Tommy Boy


There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals.  The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.  ~G.K. Chesterton

Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville


Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites.  We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay.  In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.  ~Saul Bellow, about America


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

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.  ~H.L. Mencken

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.  ~Hunter S. Thompson

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.  ~Gore Vidal


I just don't know why they're shooting at us.  All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread.  Transplant the American dream.  Freedom.  Achievement.  Hyperacidity.  Affluence.  Flatulence.  Technology.  Tension.  The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.  ~Hawkeye, M*A*S*H, "O.R."

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.  ~Chauncey Depew, at an 1881 New England Society meeting in New York

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.  ~Hansell B. Duckett

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate.  Being here in America doesn't make you an American.  Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.  ~Malcolm X


Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin


America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.  ~John Updike
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered.  I myself would say that it had merely been detected.  ~Oscar Wilde


I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them.  There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.  ~John Wayne

The American experiment is the most tremendous and far reaching engine of social change which has ever either blessed or cursed mankind.  ~Charles Francis Adams


There is a malaise that exists in your land - what appears to many as the sudden and tragic disappearance of the American dream which, in some ways, has turned to nightmare.  ~J.J. Greene


The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.  ~Thomas Jefferson


It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.  ~Alistair Cooke


America is a mistake, a giant mistake.  ~Sigmund Freud


America! half-brother of the world!
With something good and bad of every land.
~Philip James Bailey


You have to be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.  ~Charles De Gaulle, Time, 8 December 1967


If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.  ~Dave Barry


[T]he American is a gentle guy; but don't pressure him; if you do he turns toad and squirts poison.  ~Martin H. Fischer

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.  ~Eldridge Cleaver

In America, with all its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun.  But we do not know yet whether the sun is rising or setting for our country.  ~Dick Gregory, 1964

Love your country.  Your country is the land where your parents sleep, where is spoken that language in which the chosen of your heart, blushing, whispered the first word of love; it is the home that God has given you that by striving to perfect yourselves therein you may prepare to ascend to him.  ~Giuseppe Mazzini

May the sun in his course visit no land more free, more happy, more lovely, than this our own country!  ~Daniel Webster

Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.  ~Winston Churchill

[P]atriotism... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.  ~Adlai Stevenson


America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.  ~Sigmund Freud


We're Americans - with a capital A!  And do you know what that means?  Do you?  It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.  ~From the movie Stripes


We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost.  We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.  ~Walter Lippmann


One characteristic of Americans is that they have no tolerance at all of anybody putting up with anything.  We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.  ~Margaret Mead


Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt.  ~Eldridge Cleaver


The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.  ~Woodrow Wilson


Let America realize that self-scrutiny is not treason.  Self-examination is not disloyalty.  ~Richard Cardinal Cushing

America is the best half-educated country in the world.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville

If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag.  ~Author Unknown

"Our country, right or wrong."  When right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.  ~Carl Schurz

This, then, is the state of the union:  free and restless, growing and full of hope.  So it was in the beginning.  So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.  ~Lyndon B.Johnson

Our great modern Republic.  May those who seekthe blessings of its institutions and the protection of its flag remember the obligations they impose.  ~Ulysses S. Grant

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.  ~Mark Twain

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.  ~Sinclair Lewis