American Life Quotes

#1. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

Norman Mailer

#2. My coffee was wedged in the cup holder in the center console. Sometimes I wondered what would happen to modern American life between dawn and 10 a.m. if Starbucks vanished. Talk about road rage.

William Casey Moreton

#3. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

Gloria Steinem

#4. As the United States drifts from its Judeo-Christian foundation and as the state becomes ever more pervasive in American life, government could ultimately insist on full allegiance from the people, an allegiance belonging only to God.

H. Wayne House

#5. Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

Russell Baker

#6. Poverty is not the stepchild of the Great Recession; poverty has always been a part of American life.

Tavis Smiley

#7. The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed.

Anita Loos

#8. The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

Adam Gopnik

#9. Political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense," Adams wrote during Jefferson's first term.12

Jon Meacham

#10. You'd have to put yourself back in the 1960s to understand how separate from the mainstream of American life soldiers felt themselves to be, because we knew that students and others were demonstrating pretty violently against what we were doing.

Joe Haldeman

#11. The final test of Afro-American studies will be the extent to which they rid the minds of whites and blacks alike of false learning, and the extent to which they promote for blacks and whites alike a completely rewarding participation in American life.

Jay Saunders Redding

#12. Sometimes i wish i'd been an englishman; american life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy

F Scott Fitzgerald

#13. It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.

Christopher Hitchens

#14. West Indian cultural mentality and a North American life equals the perfect balance.

Melanie Fiona

#15. I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

Sue Monk Kidd

#16. The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course, the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and fruitful definition of the democratic ideal.

Herbert Croly

#17. That's one of the things about the Tea Party people. They think corporations have too much influence in American life and they do.

Howard Dean

#18. The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life.

Herbert Hoover

#19. It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life - for all its material good fortune - has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.

Sebastian Junger

#20. We have to be honest, we have to be truthful and speak to the one dirty secret in American life, and that is racism.

Henry Cisneros

#21. The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#22. Yale is a crucible in American life for the accommodation of intellectual achievement, of wisdom, of refinement, with the democratic ideals of openness, of social justice and of equal opportunity.

Benno C. Schmidt Jr.

#23. People are interested in pro football because it provides them with an emotional oasis; they don't want football to get involved in the same types of court cases, racial problems and legislative issues they encounter in the rest of American life.

Pete Rozelle

#24. A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

Kevin Spacey

#25. The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.

Mary McCarthy

#26. The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life.

Jackie Kennedy

#27. Christianity has lost its place at the center of American life. Christians must learn how to live the gospel as a distinct people who no longer occupy the center of society. We must learn to build relational bridges that win a hearing."7

Hugh Halter

#28. My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.

Frederick Wiseman

#29. Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

Charles Vest

#30. Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.

Brad Paisley

#31. Women as a raw demographic unit exercise incredible power across every element of American life.

Rachel Sklar

#32. Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

Joe Klein

#33. There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Bruce Catton

#34. Year by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of ours vacations are essential.

Ellsworth Huntington

#35. The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time.

Bill Bryson

#36. The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

Marya Mannes

#37. In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life.

Paul Vitz

#38. They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence
ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren't crazy. You're right.

Joanna Russ

#39. The railroads once were a dominant power in American life, for good and for ill. There's something inevitably nostalgic about a train book today. Trains attract us, but part of that attraction is cultural memory.

Brian Floca

#40. The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen.

David L. Sills

#41. It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Russell Baker

#42. Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know.

Sarah Vowell

#43. The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.

Norman Finkelstein

#44. I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

Ira Glass

#45. The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

Randall Kennedy

#46. The Clinton tax increase - which was an increase in taxes primarily on upper-income people - not only made the tax code more nearly progressive, it preceded one of the most productive economic periods in American life.

Barney Frank

#47. In Conclusion, let us inquire what has been and what is to be the Meaning of the Great Plains in American Life

Walter P. Webb

#48. For most Americans, work is central to their experience of the world, and the corporation is one of the fundamental institutions of American life, with an enormous impact, for good and ill, on how we live, think, and feel.

James Surowiecki

#49. I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American life, and I hope he continues.

Norman Finkelstein

#50. It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.

J. Maarten Troost

#51. The English Language Amendment says above all, 'Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English. Let us not deny them the opportunity to participate in American life, so that they can go as far as their dreams and talents can take them.

S.I. Hayakawa

#52. As God was expunged from American life, idols came in to fill the void; idols of sensuality, idols of greed, of money, of success, comfort, materialism, pleasure, sexual immorality, self-worship, self-obsession. The sacred increasingly disappeared, and the profane took its place.

Jonathan Cahn

#53. The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group - to say nothing of gay marriage - are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.

Jeffrey Kluger

#54. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

Alex Pareene

#55. When the Promise of American life is conceived as a national ideal, whose fulfillment is a matter of artful and laborious work, the effect thereof is substantially to identify the national purpose with the social problem.

Herbert Croly

#56. I'd left them because I'd loved them. Beth and my parents and my friends and my life-my free, American life. I loved them, and if I had a chance to protect them from the people who wanted to destroy them then I had to take that chance even if it meant I would never see them again.

Andrew Klavan

#57. There is a need for heroism in American life today.

Vicki Baum

#58. The great scandal of American life is that we pay for German levels of government without enjoying the related benefits.

Kevin D. Williamson

#59. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

Walter Lippmann

#60. Primarily, we need to change 100 years of thinking, where we try to extend the promise of American life by moving things to Washington, and let's move it the other way: less of Washington, more from ourselves.

Lamar Alexander

#61. The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.

Jon Meacham

#62. To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against the liberty of conscience, which is one of the foundations of American life.

Theodore Roosevelt

#63. Envy is the central fact of American life.

Gore Vidal

#64. There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

Alan Dershowitz

#65. Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

Joshua Ferris

#66. American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

George Santayana

#67. Today's secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life.

Bruce L. Shelley

#68. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

David Foster Wallace

#69. The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.'

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#70. I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to 'This American Life' more times than I can count!

Zoe Kazan

#71. The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.

William O. Douglas

#72. The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

Reza Aslan

#73. A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

John Pomfret

#74. The medicalization of American life from birth to death is killing our souls.

Hattie Bryant

#75. President Obama and members of his administration constantly express rage and anger over events totally within their control. It's an odd and unsettling fact of American life that so many Americans seem to think that such expressions of frustration should substitute for actual competence.

Ben Shapiro

#76. This is the clearest, most powerful summons yet, TO ALL OF US, to restore the American story to its rightful, vital place in American life and in how we educate our children. It couldn't be more timely and important.

David McCullough

#77. We will send ships and Marines as soon as possible for the protection of American life and property.

Theodore Roosevelt

#78. An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.

Terry Southern

#79. I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.

Herbert Hoover

#80. And that is one of the worst things about this life. As a liar, a pretend person, you cannot really truly ever be someone's friend. My American life, it is lonely. Often, it is very, very lonely.

Jillian Cantor

#81. The times we live in often dictate the type of entertainment we seek
and we're starting to slide once more into a very dark and scary corner of American life.

Chuck Wendig

#82. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade.

Christopher L. Hayes

#83. Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide - freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open.

George Lakoff

#84. There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books ... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.

Paul Vitz

#85. Our families and our homes are the center of American life, Everything we do is to make those homes-and the lives in them-more beautiful, more comfortable, more functional and more full of life and light and joy for those we love.

Martha Stewart

#86. It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.

Hans Hofmann

#87. One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function.

Paul Beatty

#88. 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.

Camille Paglia

#89. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Ralph Ellison

#90. The actual God of many Americans ... is simply the current of American life.

Charles Horton Cooley

#91. In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.

J.G. Holland

#92. if college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we're indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix.

Thomas M. Nichols

#93. I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.

Sarah Koenig

#94. Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.

Dan Chaon

#95. The world of tricky-tacky boxes, defined social behaviour, untrammeled egotism, sexism and material acquisitiveness, all powered by insecurity that passes for security, is rarely cajoled, least of all questioned. Much of the magic of of life space contrast has passed out of North American life.

Geoff Mains

#96. To the European immigrant - that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life - the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.

Herbert Croly

#97. Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.

John F. Kennedy

#98. The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.

David K. Shipler

#99. My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

Douglas Sirk

#100. The materialistic idealism that governs American life, that on the one hand makes a chariot of every grocery wagon, and on the other a mere hitching post of every star, lets every man lead a very enticing double life.

Louis Kronenberger