American High School Quotes

#1. American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

Khaled Hosseini

#2. Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

#3. Which, as any American high school student can tell you, was an act that apparently had something to do with stamps.

Dave Barry

#4. The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

Gore Vidal

#5. All of a sudden, making a Spanish-American War joke. I think you sort of had to go to probably to an American high school to have remembered that.

David Mandel

#6. I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

Mandy Patinkin

#7. American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading, math and science. We're even trailing France.

Suzanne Fields

#8. The American dream always meant that anybody willing to put in a hard day's work could make a decent living. That's just not true anymore for people without at least some post-high school education.

Adam Davidson

#9. My childhood, adolescence and high school days are unusually important. If there has ever been a time that I developed a uniqueness and sense of humor and the ability to organize, it was then. In those early days, I developed the skills that gave me a certain degree of success in American politics.

Lee Atwater

#10. I'm very much half-American - my mom is American. I grew up in Australia until I was 16, then I finished high school over here because I got into this performing arts high school.

Betty Who

#11. It feels a bit like high school, only with guns and uniforms, and instead of learning trigonometry or North American history, we learn better ways to kill people and blow up their stuff.

Marko Kloos

#12. I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.

Laurence Yep

#13. No, I had no problem communicating with Latin American heads of state - though now I do wish I had paid more attention to Latin when I was in high school.

Dan Quayle

#14. I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.

Ellen Ochoa

#15. I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all.

T. J. Miller

#16. My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.

Katha Pollitt

#17. Emma and I had both died twice, and for me, that second one actually stuck. Now I was a "resurrected American," better known, in colloquial terms, as life-challenged. Or undead. Or the living dead. But I'm not a zombie. I'm just a little less alive than your average high school junior.

Rachel Vincent

#18. I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.

Burt Bacharach

#19. Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'

Terry Teachout

#20. High school dropouts are forfeiting their opportunity to pursue the American Dream.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#21. American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.

Camille Paglia

#22. We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.

Sarah Snook

#23. I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.

Dave Barry

#24. You know I got kicked out of high school and I used to go to Hendrix concerts. I used to go see Marvin Gaye and B.B. King and so here I am on television as an actor playing the part of this really sweet wholesome all American boy. The reality was I had a much different kind of teenage life.

David Cassidy

#25. Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I'm old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.

Robert David Hall

#26. High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

Douglas Coupland

#27. I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.

Olivia De Havilland

#28. High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Kurt Vonnegut

#29. The American idea that everyone graduates high school at 18 is a good one.

David Miliband

#30. When I was in high school, I liked to pretend that I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I would do things like go into a pizza restaurant and tell them I'd never had pizza before, and they'd bring me into the kitchen and show me how to make an American pizza. It's really fun.

Misha Collins

#31. My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.

Eric Stoltz

#32. The most volatile current debate among American school administrators, teachers, parents, and students concerns "high-stakes" testing. The stakes are considered high because instead of simply testing students to measure their progress, schools are increasingly held accountable for the results.

Anonymous

#33. We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors know what high school seniors should know about American history.

Glenn Beck

#34. If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.

Janet Napolitano

#35. When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.

Sam Trammell

#36. If I wasn't serving in Congress, I've always wanted to be a high school teacher. Specifically, I want to teach a course on modern American history and use Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury as a primary text.

Brad Schneider

#37. In January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts.

Ken Robinson

#38. A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

Gene Wolfe

#39. When I was in the 9th grade I was flunking out of high school. And that's why I'm so encouraged by the fact that America is the place where opportunity and American exceptionalism is alive and well.

Tim Scott

#40. I've been playing American football since I was six years old. I was a captain of my high school team, playing strong safety.

Gabriel Luna

#41. The 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.

G. Willow Wilson

#42. I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.

Timothy Ferriss

#43. Got it. You're fourteen. I'm proud you can count that high. It's a testament to the modern American education system. But I should probable point out that you're not the only one. I'm told you go to a school with a whole class of-get this-kids who are fourteen.- Ash

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#44. In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We've had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don't finish high school!

Milton Friedman