Top 100 American Was Quotes
#1. In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.
Werner Heisenberg
#2. But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.
George Takei
#3. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?
Kenzaburo Oe
#4. A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.
John Steinbeck
#5. The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.
Michael Frayn
#6. The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.
Douglas Brinkley
#7. The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.
Mark Twain
#8. I had intended to have gone into Africa incognito. But the fact that a white man, even an American, was about to enter Africa was soon known all over Zanzibar.
Henry Morton Stanley
#9. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#10. Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population - that they are foreign and exotic and un-American - was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago.
Reza Aslan
#11. Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.
Laurie Colwin
#12. You look like a black American was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#13. In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania.
Bill Dedman
#14. Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.
Margaret Atwood
#15. My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
Tayari Jones
#16. I savored my time on top of the podium by watching the American flag rise up out of the crowd as the anthem played, thinking about how every single second of training I've done was for this minute and how many people played a role in my achievement.
Hannah Kearney
#17. It was incredibly cheesy set with torches [TV's Survivor] - it looked like the lobby of the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. And here as some guy pulling names out of a coconut, and I said, 'This is the thing that has made American mass media stop in their tracks?
Tom Hanks
#18. At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.
John Gould
#19. I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it.
Gloria Reuben
#20. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#21. Did you enjoy yourself?' I asked.
'Mmm,' he said. 'It was fun, wasn't it?' He wasn't using a knife, but held a fork in his right hand like a child or an American. He smiled.
Gail Honeyman
#22. Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.
Shane Claiborne
#23. David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.
Terry Southern
#24. You done decided you want to go to the dance yet Brenda?" "Didn't I tell you that dances was lame?" "What's lame about them?" "I like mature niggas." "I'm not a nigga." "What are you?" "An African American." "Well I don't like African Americans. I like niggas.
Vincent Morris
#25. It happens to be a matter of record that I was first in print with the discovery that the tastelessness of the food offered in American clubs varies in direct proportion to the exclusiveness of the club.
Calvin Trillin
#26. Edward Bellamy's eugenic utopian novel, "Looking Backward" was the inspiration for American Progressivism.
A.E. Samaan
#27. The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.
Michael Greger
#28. There aren't many American directors here trying to direct a Japanese yakuza film. When you combine that with the fact that I don't speak much Japanese and this was an independent film I was financing myself - people were curious about what I was doing.
John Foster
#29. Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.
Jose Andres
#30. For more than 220 years - from the 1620s to the 1840s - most American schooling was independent of government control, subsidy, and influence. From this educational freedom the American Republic was born.
Marshall Fritz
#31. It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ...
Jan Morris
#32. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#33. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#34. Why don't they just take him out?" I asked. I'm not politically minded, as I guess you can tell. Mr. Cataliades was smiling at me. "So direct, so classic," he said. "So American.
Charlaine Harris
#35. The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.
Robert Kennedy
#36. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."
Ronald Reagan
#37. Who won the 2004 World Series?"
She shrugged, "The Yankees?"
"The Yankees? And you claim to be an American?" He enjoyed rubbing it in after her attitude about Harrisburg. "It was the Red Sox. The year they broke the curse.
Brandon Mull
#38. The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply.
Kelly Miller
#39. When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.
Alice Hamilton
#40. Panama still more extraordinary machines would work an even more astonishing success. The wonderful thing was that the American dredges did
David McCullough
#41. Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.
Robert Crumb
#42. When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.
Baz Luhrmann
#44. The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You'd think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.
Hanna Rosin
#45. The daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth the candle.
Walter Cronkite
#46. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.
Ketch Secor
#47. Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.
Jeffrey Toobin
#48. Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.
Al Gore
#49. They were singing in French, but the melody was freedom and any American could understand that.
Audie Murphy
#50. To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
Isaac Asimov
#51. Americans had to work around the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment, and more broadly around their announced traditions of equality; and in consequence their law was a law of covert devices and legal subterfuges. American law, as Krieger wrote, was a law of Umwege, devious legal pathways.
James Q. Whitman
#52. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#53. 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
#54. On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.
Malcolm Bradbury
#55. Barack Obama was not born into wealth or privilege, yet today his is president of these United States of America. Barack Obama has lived the American Dream. He has walked in our shoes.
Ken Salazar
#56. In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger.
Dave Barry
#57. I truly believe that if torture had worked and there was a case to be made for it, we would see that on the front pages of the American press.
Robert Baer
#58. Titanic I thought was the most dreadful piece of work I've ever seen in my entire life. Another film that I think is equally bad was American Beauty. So badly acted and directed. But people like that.
Robert Altman
#59. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.
Mark R. Jones
#60. Mention the name George W. Bush in mixed company, and you're likely to spark a lot of debate and emotion - hot and cold, good and bad. Not a lot of neutral reaction. He was elected in the most controversial contest in American electoral history and governed during one of the most tumultuous decades.
Mark McKinnon
#61. My view of myself doesn't change. I know who I am. I'm Cuban American; both my parents are Cuban - one was a little browner than the other one. That's who I am. I feel sorry that it's taken so long for the film industry to figure it out and to catch up.
Gina Torres
#62. 'American Idol' was just really a platform. What you do after that is what separates you from the show. And I've been working really hard, touring constantly, and building those fans. You've got to work hard.
Phillip Phillips
#63. My earliest memories are of watching 'Star Trek' and 'MASH' while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
Mohsin Hamid
#64. The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter.
Herbert Croly
#65. I was not very well-behaved. I remember I was a discipline problem. I was a typical American male at twenty years old, and I was causing trouble whenever I could.
Peter DeLuise
#66. What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.
Nia Vardalos
#67. Gowdy had a love affair with the microphone and the fans had a love affair with him. American sports fans truly lost an icon, a legend who never felt he was bigger than anyone else. He had that humility that made him special, and he made everyone feel like they were so important.
Dick Vitale
#68. No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States and compounding the American people into one common mass.
John Marshall
#69. The 20th-century ulcer epidemic was a sign of good health in American people - good diet, strong acidity and healthy immune response actually make ulcers more likely. That's why businessmen eating giant T-bone steaks were prone to ulcers.
Barry Marshall
#70. I was turning down cigarette campaigns before it became fashionable. I wouldn't let CBS Radio sell 'The Stan Freberg Show' to R.J. Reynolds and American Tobacco, which had sponsored Jack Benny, the man I replaced.
Stan Freberg
#71. She said "sweet boy" again, as if making a diagnosis like tooth decay or flat feet. I was embarrassed. I didn't know if I was being insulted or complimented.
Shawn Stewart Ruff
#72. I was on TV for almost sixteen weeks during American Idol. It's at the point now where it's old.
Clay Aiken
#73. The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church.
Charles Eastman
#74. It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.
Vincent Bugliosi
#75. It was great to do August Rush and have all the challenges of playing that character, especially the American accent for the first time and also playing the guitar and the conducting I had to do.
Freddie Highmore
#76. According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#77. [Hillary] Clinton was able to assemble a winning Democratic coalition out here, beating Sanders among African-Americans, women, among women, and voters from union households, so, unions, women, African-Americans.
Chris Matthews
#78. I was chomping at the bit to get my career started - so after I took all the theater courses at Brooklyn College I enrolled in a two year program at AMDA in the city (The American Musical Dramatic Academy) I was there for 6 months and loved it.
Didi Conn
#79. In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.
Murray Rothbard
#80. This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
Vine Deloria Jr.
#81. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#82. I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
Joseph Stiglitz
#83. I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
Aasif Mandvi
#84. The risk for me has to do with the nudity aspects. I'm an American actress in mainstream movies, and I would like to always be able to do them. For some reason, nudity is perceived differently here than it is elsewhere, and I didn't want to lose any American audience that I was building.
Amanda Seyfried
#85. When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.
Jonas Carpignano
#86. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.
Barack Obama
#87. Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.
Tom Shales
#88. I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage.
Kathy Baker
#89. During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam.
Gerald R. Ford
#90. I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.
Dr. Seuss
#91. The Endgame book was an American soup, if everything can be predicted what's the purpose to read it?
Deyth Banger
#92. If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
Ruth Reichl
#93. Jake Johnson wanted to make clear that he was the great American actor, not just the funny guy on 'New Girl.'
Colin Trevorrow
#94. None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.
George Lucas
#95. The British audience was very important to me. I have always looked away from American to non-American audiences and so this was important.
Robert Sheckley
#96. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#97. The financial crisis was a classic case of the political class failing the American people. Twenty-five agencies were supposed to be minding the store during the financial crisis and every one of them was asleep at the switch.
Carly Fiorina
#98. When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.
Clint Eastwood
#99. A traitor is a betrayer - one who practices injury, while professing friendship. Benedict Arnold was a traitor, solely because, while professing friendship for the American cause, he attempted to injure it. An open enemy, however criminal in other respects, is no traitor.
Lysander Spooner
#100. He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.
Albert Speer
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