An American Life Quotes

#1. The lesson of an American life like my father's ... is that achievements are compatible with decency (112).

Saul Bellow

#2. When I was working on the unauthorized biography 'Stan Musial: An American Life,' which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

George Vecsey

#3. 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

#4. Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)

Walter Isaacson

#5. Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.

Black Elk

#6. The whole world is being 'deculturalized' into a uniform 'Coca-Cola society,' wanting and needing an American way of life.

Helen Caldicott

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.

James Howard Kunstler

#10. 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

#11. Yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short. Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. What we have seen in Baltimore should, indeed I think does, tear at our soul.

Hillary Clinton

#12. The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#13. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

Cory Booker

#14. People believe that through the American way of life they can work together to encourage wider ownership of economic activities. In this way, they believe they can develop an economy of abundance which will provide a maximum of security and freedom.

Murray D. Lincoln

#15. MR. WEINGLASS: Between the date of your birth, November 30, 1936, and May 1, 1960, what if anything occurred in your life?
HOFFMAN: Nothing. I believe it is called an American education.
-from the Chicago 7 trial

Abbie Hoffman

#16. I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden for the rest of my life. My political life is over. I will never again have an opportunity to serve in any official position. Maybe I can give a little advice from time to time.

Richard M. Nixon

#17. When you're an artist, your personal life and your professional life kind of blend together. I'm writing from home so I don't have an office or anything. I don't know where to draw the line between "Okay, let's stop now and watch American Idol."

Daryl Wein

#18. The statement 'There is nothing more American than an Indian' happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.

Charles Slagle

#19. I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

John Lahr

#20. When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

E.B. White

#21. This is my love line ... It says an incredibly sexy, but totally infuriating redheaded woman with barge into my life and drive me insane.

Denise Grover Swank

#22. Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after that son-of-a-bitch who never comes though.

Tom Robbins

#23. There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.

Mark Kirk

#24. I'm not an immigrant - I was born and raised in New York. My parents are Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S., for the people that don't know. So my whole life, I've identified as an American. There are times when I've gone to Puerto Rico, and there, I'm seen as the American cousin.

Elizabeth Rodriguez

#25. I know I'm an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I'm not a jazz musician. I'm not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It's in between these areas.

Anthony Braxton

#26. As an African American actress, there are people who have been staples in my life that opened a door that I can walk through. I hope that I can have that impact.

Monique Coleman

#27. If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

Richard Russo

#28. Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the proposition that this too will be the American century.

John Podhoretz

#29. In the time it takes American literary titan William H. Gass to write a novel, other artists have been born, completed their life's work and died. That may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

Tony D'Souza

#30. Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!

Kailin Gow

#31. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Martin Amis

#32. I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

Douglas MacArthur

#33. All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.

Nick Hornby

#34. 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

#35. Life is a dangerous adventure, says the American, and he is half right: life is dangerous, but it's not an adventure.

Jose Bergamin

#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. He had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West.

Mary Doria Russell

#38. For me, the American promise isn't just an idea or a theory - it's my life story.

Cristina Saralegui

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.

Jimmy Carter

#42. I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.

Henry Rollins

#43. 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

#44. I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

Lois Lowry

#45. As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

Coretta Scott King

#46. The instruments of war can be manufactured ... human blood cannot be; and the lack of just one pint could mean the life of an American serviceman.

George C. Marshall

#47. 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

#48. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

Arthur Miller

#49. Your life can be different, Young Ju. Study and be strong. In America, women have choices.

An Na

#50. 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

#51. I am overwhelmed with gratitude, and my heart is full. 'American Sniper' has broken records, which follows such an honest path of Chris's life.

Taya Kyle

#52. While American roads offer predictable safety, Indian roads compensate by providing unending entertainment, and even some opportunities for self growth. An Indian road is a stage where Life seems to be unabashedly living itself out.

Ajit Harsinghani

#53. Although the Jeffersonian Law ("All men are created equal") is the first article of the American faith, the facts of American life have demonstrated for some time now that it is an irksome faith to live by.

Alistair Cooke

#54. In general, American social life constitutes an evasion of talking to people. Most Americans don't, in any vital sense, get together; they only do things together.

Louis Kronenberger

#55. Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly ...

Ada Louise Huxtable

#56. The new American Dream is about having an interesting life, not making a lot of money.

Penelope Trunk

#57. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Soledad O'Brien

#58. The United States is no longer first in the world in upward mobility. We can reverse that trend by giving our young children an equal start in life as they begin their journey to fulfill the American Dream.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#59. President [Bush] believes that [high-energy consumption] is an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.

Ari Fleischer

#60. Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .

Susan Rose

#61. 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

#62. You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life.

Henry Cabot Lodge

#63. Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life
a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality
then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

Gloria Steinem

#64. With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench.

Jim Walsh

#65. For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race.

David Berlinski

#66. Dad worked his entire career as an aviation technician. Mom was a legal secretary who became a teacher. We lived a simple American life.

Brian Sandoval

#67. We are still a country where hard work and perseverance can earn you a better life ... Yet we are rightfully troubled that many of our people are still caught in what seems to be a pervasive, unending financial struggle ... every American deserves an equal opportunity to achieve success.

Marco Rubio

#68. Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life's work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis

#69. When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.

Paul Ryan

#70. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Siri Hustvedt

#71. Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#72. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Sally Armstrong

#73. I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.

George W. S. Trow

#74. Let's face it, though, anything that's apt to happen to an appliance like a blender isn't covered by the warranty anyway, so I never send them in. If it breaks, I'll buy a new one. That's the American way.

Andy Rooney

#75. Hiking is like life...
You can spend the whole trip just watching the trail ahead, worrying that you'll twist an ankle or fall.
And then you miss all this.

Susannah Scott

#76. The jobs crisis has reached a boiling point, which is why we see Occupy Wall Street protestors crying out for an America that lets all of us reach for the American Dream again - a dream that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life and retire with dignity.

John Garamendi

#77. Well, what I will tell you is the support from the world - it's not just an African-American citizen. There are people of all different walks of life who are rallying behind the concerns with the that Sandy was treated because what that says to me is that this is an American issue.

Sharon Cooper

#78. There are lots of things that I will probably never experience in this life. Military combat. Being dictator of a small central American country. Dunking a basketball. Being a famous rock star. Or walking on Mars. But one thing I have been, and will always be, is an entrepreneur.

Michael Arrington

#79. In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.

Gloria Steinem

#80. There must be a renewal of the spirit of our forefathers, an
appreciation of the American way of life, a strengthening of muscle and sinew and the character of the nation. America needs guts as well as guns.
National character is the core of national defense.

Ezra Taft Benson

#81. Once Hamilton was initiated into the cause of American liberty, his life acquired an even more headlong pace that never slackened.

Ron Chernow

#82. If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

Henry James

#83. I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if ... " and it blossoms into a whole novel.

Jodi Picoult

#84. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.

Rashers Tierney

#85. If you do an American TV series, before the audition you sign away the next five years of your life.

Dominic West

#86. What worried Roosevelt was the inability of ordinary people to see the danger of this proliferation of cogs and cylinders and coins in American life.23 The corrupt power of corporations was increasing at an alarming rate,

Edmund Morris

#87. They were so ... larger than life, these Yanks, with their ready smiles and booming voices. And their gratitude ... She'd lost track of the times an American had hugged her so tightly she'd come off her feet.

Kristin Hannah

#88. I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life.

Charles Lindbergh

#89. I was 19 when I first auditioned for 'American Idol.' I'd never been on an airplane; I'd never been outside of my hometown, except to go to Myrtle Beach. I'm 22 now. I'm learning a lot about life, and it's all in front of the cameras.

Kellie Pickler

#90. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.

Michael Eric Dyson

#91. Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

Henry James

#92. Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.

Tess Gerritsen

#93. I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life.

Harvey Pekar

#94. Speaking as a Democrat, all my life battling for what I conceived to be Democracy, and what I conceived to be right, I am yet an American above Democracy.

Richard Parks Bland

#95. A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights)

Jonathan Santlofer

#96. The average life expectancy for a black man in an American city is something like twenty-three very short years. The reality of that had never fully kicked in before, but it did that night. And I thought, hell, I'm at risk just walking around.

Suzanne Brockmann

#97. The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

Nelson Algren

#98. Did you ever stand on a street corner in American at five o'clock in the morning?
I did.

Jack Kerouac

#99. I talk about life, and I make universal music with an American style - and that's what I do.

Nas

#100. I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

Osama Bin Laden