Top 100 An American Quotes
#2. I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new
by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.
Ralph Ellison
#4. I wouldn't mind being in an American film for a laugh, but I certainly don't want to be in Thingy Blah Blah 3, if you know what I mean.
Audrey Tautou
#5. I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.
Daniel Ellsberg
#6. What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?
Lewis H. Lapham
#7. I am trying to make my accent so it won't bother anyone, but I am not going to drive myself crazy trying to pretend I am an American girl when I am from Colombia.
Shakira
#8. They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here ... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'
Jhumpa Lahiri
#9. It was a rich and gorgeous sunset - an American sunset; and the ruddy glow of the sky was reflected from some extensive pools of water among the shadowy copses in the meadow below.
Francis Parkman
#10. I ended up as an American Studies Major but my real interest was architecture.
Steve Purdy
#11. I became an American citizen three years ago, and if I'd been arrested, maybe that wouldn't have happened. That was a very proud moment, by the way. I still have my Irish passport, but becoming an American citizen was important in terms of my family.
Jason O'Mara
#12. The "Warrior Ethos" emphasizes placing the mission first, not accepting defeat, and being disciplined physically and mentally. Why? Because an American Soldier is a "guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
Dan Smee
#13. I am an American, steeped in American values. But I know on an emotional level what it means to be of the Chinese culture.
Amy Tan
#14. I think that in a year I may retire. I cannot take my money with me when I die and I wish to enjoy it, with my family, while I live. I should prefer living in Germany to any other country, though I am an American, and am loyal to my country.
Harry Houdini
#15. People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.
George McGovern
#16. The motivation I possessed to serve my country is what got me out of the small town of Lyons, Texas where I grew up, and into the world of service, love of country, helping others, and being an American soldier." (Page 90).
Kenneth A. Bracewell
#17. To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
#18. The European generally submits to a public officer because he represents a superior force; but to an American he represents a right. In America it may be said that no one renders obedience to man, but to justice and to law.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#19. By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:
R.K. Narayan
#20. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. Then white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow.
Eddie Huang
#21. I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim.
Maya Angelou
#22. Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.
Aman Mojadidi
#23. An American Idol is someone that has all the qualities that America thinks is positive, attractive and alluring.
Mario Vazquez
#24. 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
#25. I could do an American accent, if I were immersed in the accent, meaning if I were living back in Los Angeles and rehearsing and auditioning the whole time.
Ioan Gruffudd
#26. Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.
Anthony Marra
#27. Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
Edith Wharton
#28. Oh yeah, alright, take it easy baby, make it last all night. She was an American Girl.
Tom Petty
#29. I am a Soviet born American Jew. I was born in and left Soviet Union, while it was and in some cases still is, oppressive and socialist nation. I love America and being an American. I could never understand, why would people willingly give up their freedom!!
Jake Danishevsky
#30. There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway - but have never been able to produce an American victory.
Robert Cowley
#31. My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.
Mercedes Lackey
#32. I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.
Alfred Stieglitz
#33. Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it.
Adam Cooper
#34. Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.
Tom Brokaw
#35. 'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
Bel Powley
#36. But we're very much an American band and that's that. I think that's part of the appeal outside of this country and it might be part of the reason people turned away from us within this country, because familiarity breeds contempt.
Michael Stipe
#37. When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'
Damian Lewis
#38. To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.
Ernest Istook
#40. I was determined not to become an American citizen but I did it for completely cynical reasons: to avoid paying inheritance tax in the U.S.
Emily Mortimer
#41. Every child had a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their old man got. But something happened on the way to that place. They threw an American flag in our face.
Billy Joel
#42. The morning paper is just as necessary for an American as dew is to the grass.
Josh Billings
#43. There's something about an American soldier you can't explain. They're so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.
Marlene Dietrich
#44. I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.
Quentin Tarantino
#45. The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.
Akio Morita
#46. I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like 'An American Werewolf in London' in theaters, so I was headed in that direction anyway.
James Roday
#47. When Michael Jackson, a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich, white woman, married Elvis Presley's daughter the Scientologist. Makes you proud to be an American, dudn't it?
Molly Ivins
#48. Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.
K'naan
#49. When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#50. To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.
Radha Mitchell
#51. I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.
Sherwood Anderson
#52. With increasing skill, the ads glorify her "role" as an American housewife-knowing that her very lack of identity in that role will make her fall for whatever they are selling.
Betty Friedan
#53. After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.
Bruce Feiler
#54. I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream--I see an American nightmare.
Malcolm X
#55. Who cares about that stuff? This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American. Let Harry be a Jew.
Arnold Rothstein
#56. Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#57. It's an American worker's right to unionize for sure, but that being said, don't expect me not to point out when or if union leadership takes advantage of union members.
Joe Wurzelbacher
#58. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.
William, Saroyan
#59. This is emphatically an age of discoveries; but I will venture the assertion, that none but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it.
William Wells Brown
#60. I'm fascinated by fire. When I was four, I wore an American fireman's hat all the time, and I still have one in my office today. Glasgow used to be called 'Tinderbox City;' there were always fires, people getting killed.
Peter Capaldi
#61. I think overall it's a disadvantage," Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator.
Malcolm Gladwell
#62. It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.
John Steinbeck
#63. One of the rudest questions you might hear from an American is "What do you do for a living?" The only proper response is "Excuse me?" followed by a self-satisfied smirk and a stony silence. Then they assume that you are independently wealthy and grovel shamefully.
Dmitry Orlov
#64. Caring for veterans shouldn't be a partisan issue. It should an American one.
Jennifer Granholm
#65. I'd have to fight for an Australian role over an American actor, and I already have to do that overseas, so why would I have to do it back at home?
Bojana Novakovic
#66. The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
Virgil Thomson
#67. There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention.
Charles Guggenheim
#68. When General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.
Randall Jarrell
#69. If you go to the Lincoln Memorial, the Second Inaugural is probably the most religious speech ever given by an American President. In its 732 words, it references God 14 times and has two verses of the Bible.
Newt Gingrich
#70. It was an amazing adventure, it was my dream to be in an American musical ... I really hope you are going to love what you are going to see.
Marion Cotillard
#71. If you're a Christian, Jew or Muslim, you're equally an American. That's the great thing about America, is the right to worship the way you see fit.
George W. Bush
#72. 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
#73. Hopefully the presence in Congress of an American who happens to be Hindu will increase America's understanding of India as well as India's understanding of America.
Tulsi Gabbard
#74. If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.
Henry A. Wallace
#75. Usually, certainly British singers, adopt an American accent when they sing and I think that usually people are thinking of somebody else, but I just think of very specific people.
Jane Horrocks
#76. Who's Britannica to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say that it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American.
Stephen Colbert
#77. A lot of things I am, and a lot of things I am not. But I think I'm about as good an American as there is. I love this country. It's been very, very good to me. And it will be good to anybody if they are willing to give of themselves.
Jimmy Dean
#78. I am closer to a European viewpoint of the world than an American one. My ethics and ideals are based on European concepts.
Bianca Jagger
#79. I see the Bush Doctrine as an American-style "enabling act," giving dictatorial powers to any sitting president.
Ron Paul
#80. I never get bored talking about themes dealing with ambition, leadership and what it means to be an American. I love that stuff. I just love it. I've loved it ever since I was on 'The West Wing.'
Rob Lowe
#81. Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.
Dennis Miller
#83. The business is so international now; you'll be working on an American film, and you'll start chatting to someone, and it's like: 'Oh, you're English, too.'
Imogen Poots
#84. I started out as an opportunistic renegade. By now, I've lasted long enough to become sort of an American Original Respectable Renegade.
Wolfman Jack
#85. Black-ish is really a show about an American family and these are some of the topics that come up - for all of us, in different ways - and we get to see how this family is walking through it.
Tracee Ellis Ross
#86. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That's the reality. He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he's not captured by us. We know that.
Eric Holder
#87. 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
#88. Conservation is an American value, and it is lacking from this bill.
Jim Costa
#89. I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.
Frances Trollope
#90. My main goal is to be the No. 1 American and the No. 1 player in the world. If an American is on top of the leader board every week, it will bring more people into the game of golf.
Paula Creamer
#91. People were floored when they saw that the underwear bomber, after less than 50 minutes of interrogation, was given the rights, privileges, and immunities of an American citizen under the Constitution.
Michele Bachmann
#92. More than ever I'm proud to be an American, to live in a country that respects the rights of all to marry whomever they love. The Supreme Court decision gives new meaning to the freedoms we cherish.
Ralph Lauren
#93. The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.
Christopher Hitchens
#94. 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
#95. It was true what they said about an American woman's southern drawl being able to melt a man.
Lyla Dune
#97. Philanthropy, charity, giving voluntarily and freely ... call it what you like, but it is truly a jewel of an American tradition.
John F. Kennedy
#98. Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. A French portion is half of an American portion, and a French meal takes twice as long to eat. You do the math.
Elizabeth Bard
#100. An American man endowed with sufficient wealth can purchase anything, but an American woman endowed with sufficient beauty does not need to.
Jacob M. Appel
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