Top 85 American Tradition Quotes
#1. The principle of self defense is an American tradition that began at Lexington and Concord.
Robert F. Williams
#3. It is within the established American tradition of satire, if America surrenders on this point, the freedom of speech is a relic of history.
Pamela Geller
#4. A Trump presidency will turn the economy around and restore the great American tradition of giving each new generation hope for brighter opportunities than those of the generation that came before.
Ivanka Trump
#5. An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.
Jack White
#6. I cannot help but wonder whether, by continuing and expanding the school lunch program, we aren't witnessing, if not encouraging, the slow demise of yet another American tradition: the brown bag. Perhaps we are beholding yet another break in the chain that links child to home.
Charles Mathias
#7. One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#8. Philanthropy, charity, giving voluntarily and freely ... call it what you like, but it is truly a jewel of an American tradition.
John F. Kennedy
#9. It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights
even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down.
John F. Kennedy
#10. For 180 years, we voted in English. That is the true American tradition, and this amendment is true to our heritage, not what has existed unnaturally for the last 20 years.
Spencer Bachus
#11. Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.
Galen Rowell
#12. Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.
Rick Santorum
#13. Settling other people's land is an American tradition.
Ariel Gore
#14. I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
Diane Wakoski
#15. As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#16. The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#17. We use a Native American tradition of the talking stick. You sit and pass it around and whoever has the stick has to talk. Some people just hold it. Others really share.
Lisa Bonet
#18. The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#19. Our American tradition of neighbor helping neighbor has always been one of our greatest strengths and most noble traditions.
Ronald Reagan
#20. The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices.
Bill Bradley
#21. You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.
Salman Rushdie
#22. The gratification of helping others is a very American tradition and a Judeo-Christian tradition. Now it is great to see young people creating funds and giving back in all sorts of productive ways. It's a terrifically satisfying thing.
Evelyn Lauder
#23. Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.
George S. Patton Jr.
#24. The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.
Jane Jacobs
#25. Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?'
She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start.
L.J.Smith
#26. There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Zephyr Teachout
#27. When we give what we can, and give it with joy, we don't just renew the American tradition of giving, we also renew ourselves.
William J. Clinton
#28. The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism.
Donald Wuerl
#29. Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.
Ron Paul
#30. To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.
Wynton Marsalis
#31. The great American tradition is one of pluralism, not exclusive secularism. The strength of our country is reflected in the contributions that we all make to the common good.
Donald Wuerl
#32. I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#33. There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.
Donald Judd
#34. Well, first of all, I don't want to debate the word conservative, but by my definition, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition and law that no one is above the law.
Dan Rather
#35. It's just an American tradition to make sure people don't leave hungry. The worst thing is to have them say, 'Great dinner, but now I have to go get a burger.'
Tom Douglas
#36. It's like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he's supposed to change for the worse. It's silly.
Barbra Streisand
#37. Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war ... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#38. When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
James Hillman
#39. The word is important in Native American tradition. You speak the path on which you walk. Your words make the trail.
Diane Glancy
#40. Offering thanks in the midst of tragedy is an American tradition, . even during a bloody Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln
#41. For us to ignore by inaction the slaughter of American civilians and American soldiers, whether in nightclubs or airline terminals, is simply not in the American tradition. Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty.
Ronald Reagan
#42. In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
#43. In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#44. I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.
Nelson Algren
#45. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
Wynton Marsalis
#46. Linda Brewer's example is inspiring, colorful and potentially very funny. Her journey also exists firmly in the Heartland tradition of American success stories and comedies.
David Duchovny
#47. It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.
Bill Taylor
#48. My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they've cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.
Arthur Hertzberg
#49. In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.
Constance Rourke
#50. In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.
Walter Kirn
#51. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#52. 'The Price Is Right,' it was an honor to be offered it because it's such an American institution. To be able to carry on this tradition with a show that has been on for so long, I thought it was a great opportunity for me.
Drew Carey
#53. Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.
Evan Bayh
#54. My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Ishmael Reed
#55. It seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state.
Sanford Levinson
#56. There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.
Ruth Reichl
#57. The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness ... Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition.
Norman Cousins
#58. As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.
Jon Landau
#59. The great tradition of America is one where people can worship the way they want to worship. And if they choose not to worship, they're just as patriotic as your neighbor. That is an essential part of why we are a great nation. If you're a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, you're equally American.
George W. Bush
#60. Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#61. I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.
Frans Lanting
#62. I have found that, in the African American oral tradition, if the words are enunciated eloquently enough, no one examines the meaning for definitive truth.
Mat Johnson
#63. The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.
Herbert Croly
#64. Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible.
Joe Klein
#65. It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view.
Laurie Anderson
#66. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#67. I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.
Gillian Welch
#68. I'm still trying to make it. I'm still trying to get this over and do it and hopefully leave some kind of a mark on the course of American music, particularly in the tradition of what you might call the singer-songwriter.
Steve Forbert
#69. Hollywood industry people are very spoiled. I don't think they can adjust to the insane, no-money, super-hard working tradition of Japanese filmmaking. I don't think any American can go through that. They don't want to work more than twelve hours and they want Saturday and Sunday off.
Ryuhei Kitamura
#70. the most lovable of exceptional American qualities (is) our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren't, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class.
Charles Murray
#71. American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.
Barack Obama
#72. Don't talk to me about aesthetics or tradition. Talk to me about what sells and what's good right now. And what the American people like is to think the underdog still has a chance.
George Steinbrenner
#73. This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.
Henry David Thoreau
#74. I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors ... who specialize in terrorism.
Barack Obama
#75. Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.
Robert Dallek
#76. 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.
Camille Paglia
#77. W. Kamau Bell is in the vanguard of a new era of American comedy for an unsettling, troubling, and strangely hopeful time. Firmly in the fearless tradition of Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, & Chris Rock. Comedy as common sense purged of the absurd hypocrisy that is Our America.
Vernon Reid
#78. I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition.
Mark Shields
#79. What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.
Arthur Hertzberg
#80. There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
John Hodgman
#81. Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.
Naomi Wolf
#82. The American patriots of today continue the tradition of the long line of patriots before them, by helping to promote liberty and freedom around the world.
John Linder
#83. Dick Clark is an American icon. I am honored that he has entrusted me with such a role in this national tradition.
Ryan Seacrest
#84. The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
Oscar Wilde
#85. Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.
Jonah Goldberg
