In this post, you will find great American Quotes from famous people, such as A. Philip Randolph, Jack Ma, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hunter S. Thompson, Willie Nelson. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.
Instead of begging OPEC to drop its oil prices, let’s use American leadership and ingenuity to solve our own energy problems.
The American Dream is a phrase we’ll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we’re redefining it now.
All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.
There are no second acts in American lives.
One of our books has been made into a musical, ‘The Great American Mousical,’ which I directed at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. And another, ‘Simeon’s Gift,’ has been adapted for a symphony orchestra and five performers. I’m also a very proud member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
The American Dream is independence and being able to create that dream for yourself.
The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States – alcohol production – and just handed it to criminals – a pretty remarkable thing to do.
Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their ‘white’ culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.
Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
We need to be investing in manufacturing and small businesses. We need to be creating a workforce where Americans can compete in a global marketplace because they have the necessary skills. And we need fairness, and we need a sustainable, strong economy that’s durable for the future.
An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say ‘Gentlemen‘ to the person with whom he is conversing.
I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.
A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.
I live in America. I love being an American.
As the Olympic torch neared Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980, signaling the opening of that year’s Winter Olympics, newspapers and magazines throughout the world offered predictions on who would win medals in the major sports. Not a single publication gave the American men’s hockey team a chance against the world powers.
The American Dream is still alive out there, and hard work will get you there. You don’t necessarily need to have an Ivy League education or to have millions of dollars startup money. It can be done with an idea, hard work and determination.
As an older generation, we need to give all our young people love and the possibility of realizing their dreams. For instance, if I get really political, the fact that some people can’t go to college, can’t even think about college, that’s not American; that’s not right.
When we say, ‘Look, Donald Trump was a friend to hip hop back in the day; so was Bill Clinton,’ It doesn’t mean that because he was a friend to hip hop back in the day, that the same Bill Clinton wasn’t at the lead of this mass incarceration of African Americans today.
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.
The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the Court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.
I liked St. Louis, when they were in the American League, because that was going home. I had all my family and friends there.
At the end of the day, when I kick back with some barbecue and a CokeZero in front of a blockbuster film playing within the convenience of my fully air-conditioned house, I’ll say a small prayer thanking God for the American culture.
I think the American Dream says that anything can happen if you work hard enough at it and are persistent, and have some ability. The sky is the limit to what you can build, and what can happen to you and your family.
By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.
The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.
When President Obama entered the White House, the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America’s bravest, our men and women in uniform, were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history.
I chose to personally support Donald Trump for president early on and referred to him as America’s blue-collar billionaire at the Republican National Convention because of his love for ordinary Americans and his kindness, generosity, and bold leadership qualities.
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Americans might not understand, but within Korea, Big Bang was one of the first artists to make their own production. We have our own interpretation of our own songs. We do our own thing.
Ethanol has reduced our nation’s dependence on imported energy, created thousands of jobs, reduced air pollution, and increased energy security. And renewable fuels cost less at the pump. It is a growth fuel that fuels opportunities for millions of Americans.
As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people’s struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
I think the most important thing that I think everyone in America must have is belief that wherever they live, whatever station they have in life, that the American dream is alive and well. I think the fracturing of trust and confidence is in the American dream.
Inflation is taxation and taxation is theft that takes more money out of hard-working Americans’ pocket books.
One night in 1974, I made the comment, ‘Here I am, this fat kid, the son of a plumber. I don’t look like a body builder; fist fight in a parking lot, it doesn’t matter. I’m getting ready to sell out this building. I’m going to sell out Madison Square Garden one day. This is the American Dream. I’m living it.’
I was very honored to get to be part of ‘American Idol.’
We’re one people, and we all live in the same house. Not the American house, but the world house.
For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.
I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.
African Americans and all people of color can benefit greatly by supporting the Clean Power Plan, which will help reduce the impacts of climate change and expand the use of clean, renewable energy from the wind and sun.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they’re all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.
There are those who would draw a sharp line between power politics and a principled foreign policy based on values. This polarized view – you are either a realist or devoted to norms and values – may be just fine in academic debate, but it is a disaster for American foreign policy. American values are universal.
Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak ‘job interview.’
You can’t be a feminist in the United States and stand up for the rights of the American woman and then say that you don’t want to stand up for the rights of Palestinian women in Palestine. It’s all connected.
Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn’t belong to the White House aides. What meat do they eat that makes them grow so great?
I used to look like an American flag. The Padre uniform makes me look like a taco. Actually, the transition has been great. I’ve made 25 new friends, and I never thought I wanted to be anything other than a Dodger, but this is fun.
The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In modern times, the American military has become more bureaucratised.
A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.
Most Americans don’t even know that Minnie Driver is English or that Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh, but people are reminded every time ‘ER’ is shown that I’m the British Dr. Corday.
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
When more Americans prefer freebies to freedom, these great United States will become a fertile ground for tyranny.
Forever 21 is my American Dream.
I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.
The American dream comes from opportunity. The opportunity comes from our founding principles, our core values that’s held together and protected by the Constitution. Those ideas are neither Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, white, or black. Those are American ideologies.
I am delighted to be joining ‘Guardian U.S.’s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. ‘Guardian U.S.’ brings the ‘Guardian’s hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years.
The American dream belongs to all of us.
No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
I try to associate myself as just being myself – and being a person, an American citizen, going out there every day and just trying to be successful.
The American dream is about freedom.
Look, the American people are smart.
I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male – or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be. Just watch a beer commercial and you’ll see what I mean.
It is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.
Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn’t mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense – the idea that anyone can make it.
I believe that the real difference in the American church is not between conservatives and liberals, fundamentalists and charismatics, nor between Republicans and Democrats. The real difference is between the aware and the unaware.
The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.
To me, there’s two symbols for Team U.S.A.: the national anthem and the American flag.
I would almost certainly vote for Trump if I was American.
When good Americans die they go to Paris.
It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.
Financial literacy is an issue that should command our attention because many Americans are not adequately organizing finances for their education, healthcare and retirement.
Old Glory represents our great American military and their sacrifices to ensure our freedom. This isn’t a political issue. This is about Patriotism, and we need more of it.
The March on Washington was a March for Jobs and Freedom. There are still too many people who are unemployed or underemployed in America – they’re black, white, Latino, Native American and Asian American.
The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.
I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies… Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.
As Trade Secretary I see the world is waiting. The Australians, the Americans, the Kiwis, the Japanese – they all want us to get Brexit done so that we can begin negotiations and forge new relationships that will open up new markets for British businesses, create jobs and attract new investment.
The way to an American economic comeback, the way to help those out of work today find a paycheck, is to unleash the forces of job creation in America. The source of new jobs isn’t going to be the bureaucracies of Washington, but rather the creativity, ingenuity, and hard work of the American people.
I will be vigilant to protect the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court, and I will work to ensure that it upholds the rule of law and safeguards those liberties that make this land one of endless possibilities for all Americans.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
When you say ‘never forget‘ to a veteran, you are implying that, as an American, you are in it with them.
In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Black history is American history.
America is a great country. I’ve been in the south, in the center and in the north. I like it. Americans are very good people. There’s just too much air-conditioning.
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We’ll break out of it. It takes time.
Americans… still believe in an America where anything’s possible – they just don’t think their leaders do.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us. It’s not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans.
I chose as the campaign logo a blue rose, which means ‘make possible the impossible.’ I think the British with Brexit, then the Americans with the election of Donald Trump, did that: They made possible the impossible.
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
The American women are very pretty and have great simplicity of character, and the extreme neatness of their appearance is truly delightful: cleanliness is everywhere even more studiously attended to here than in England.
Black women I’m talking to you, because it’s not white women, it’s not Latino, it’s not Native American – I checked, it’s y’all. The self hate is ridiculous. Why do you hate yourself so much, why do you hate your texture, why do you hate your culture, why do you hate your history?
I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like ‘An American Werewolf in London‘ in theaters, so I was headed in that direction anyway.
I think race has been a burden for black Americans. Being Muslim has also been a challenge because so many people do not understand Islam.
We’re at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.
Healthcare is a human right. No one should face bankruptcy or death because of lack of healthcare. All Americans – regardless of their health or residential status – should be able to access the healthcare they need, whenever they need it.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
The real truth is that the Obama administration is professional at bullying, as we have witnessed with ACORN at work during the presidential campaign. It seems to me they are sending down their bullies to create fist fights among average American citizens who don’t want a government-run health care plan forced upon them.
I will fight every day to protect the health of our communities, to provide comprehensive care for our women and our mothers, to defend coverage for those who have pre-existing conditions, and to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable, quality health care.
We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.
We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.
I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education – that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.
People are trying to figure out what American food is; it’s certainly an amalgamation.
For some people, the definition of who is and who isn’t an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
I continue to believe that the American people have a love-hate relationship with inflation. They hate inflation but love everything that causes it.
In the last ten years of watching films I have found that some of the foreign films I saw affected me most. One American film that stands out for me for its workmanship and artistry is ‘Ratatouille.’ It was an astonishing effort in filmmaking.
The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English – the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
November is Native American Heritage month, and a good time to honor the legacy of our ancestors, but every day we should stop to think about our country’s beginning and that the United States would not exist if not for a great deal of sacrifice, blood, and tears by Indian Tribes across the country.
I’ve created a bridge between European electronic culture and urban American culture, and I’ve worked with established brands.
When reflecting upon it today, that the Pearl Harbor attack should have succeeded in achieving surprise seems a blessing from Heaven. It was clear that a great American fleet had been concentrated in Pearl Harbor, and we supposed that the state of alert would be very high.
Ninety-nine percent of the men and women of the FBI… are just professionals. I don’t want Americans, if an FBI agent knocks on their door, to have to be worried about well, is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s an FBI agent.
I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.
‘The more expensive the better’ is kind of the American way, and if you spent $600 for a sweatshirt, then that makes it better.
I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.
The American multinational companies made millions and millions of dollars from globalization.
For me, being an ‘American Latina‘ means identifying with and being influenced by both my American upbringing and my Latin heritage, and I have so much appreciation for how those two cultures have created who I am.
Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.
I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.
The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force.
The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.
You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.
Standing up for what you believe in, to me, is freedom of speech. And that’s a right that every American citizen has and what makes this country great.
I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.
‘American Honey‘ takes you into the feelings of a girl travelling through the United States while giddily in love. You see modern America through her intense feelings. But again and again the film pulls the rug out from under your feet – scenes never play out as you expect.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
In the end, the American dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in the span of one generation. But each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.
The American Dream is one of success, home ownership, college education for one’s children, and have a secure job to provide these and other goals.
My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.
Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.
We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
Now we have black and white elected officials working together. Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.
As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.
I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.
The American Dream is really money.
Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent.
If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end, and the question which now distracts the country will be settled just as surely as all other difficulties of like character which have originated in this government have been adjusted.
My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn’t until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.
If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.
I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.
Sometimes I’ll put on a Zig Ziglar tape: he’s a motivational speaker who is really funny and really American. I know I should do the things he says, but I’m too cynical.
Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ’em.
The American Dream is that any man or woman, despite of his or her background, can change their circumstances and rise as high as they are willing to work.
Education is the gateway to the American Dream. But today our immigration laws make higher education – a virtual requirement for financial security – out of reach for more than one million undocumented students.
Only Americans can hurt America.
Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
