First American Quotes

#1. I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

Richard M. Nixon

#2. 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

#3. Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

Robert Motherwell

#4. The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space carried huge expectations along with it.

Sally Ride

#5. I return with feelings of misgiving from my third war-I was the first American commander to put his signature to a paper ending a war when we did not win it.

Bill Vaughan

#6. If you're the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help.

Pete Hamill

#7. 'The Road' was my first American film, my first film in the snow. The first of everything. So, I was jumping into it, and that was pretty grueling.

Kodi Smit-McPhee

#8. It really was a hell of a motorcycle, ..It was arguably the first American motorcycle company, beating Harley by a year or so. Indian was the standard by which everything was gauged.

Jerry Springer

#9. But when it did, when the first American fell to his knees, the government was ill prepared for the fallout and the sickness spread like wildfire.

Madeline Sheehan

#10. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#11. The only criticism heard with any frequency of Elton John's first American album, 'Elton John,' was that the production was too grandiose. The melodies were superb, and lyrics frequently very good, and the performances flawless.

Jon Landau

#12. You might say the first American Revolution was against the tyranny of King George. The second American Revolution must be against the tyranny of selfishness." This

Rita Mae Brown

#13. Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.

Terry Teachout

#14. The Challenger was the first American spacecraft to carry astronauts but have no escape system.

Hugh Harris

#15. The first American word that I learned was cheeseburger. And the first sentence I learned was, "I'm sorry but we don't serve breakfast after 12 o'clock."

Callan McAuliffe

#16. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

Hunter S. Thompson

#17. President George W. Bush is the first American president to call openly for two-states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Lee H. Hamilton

#18. I am a freestyle mogul skier who, on February 13, became the first American to win a gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Hannah Kearney

#19. In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

Michael Stipe

#20. When you watch the first 'American Pie' movie, you're like ... 'I know that jock who's kind of sweet and has a girlfriend, and I know that weird off-beat kid.'

Hayden Schlossberg

#21. When I was doing the first 'American Pie' movie, I was just happy to have a job. We had a good time, and it was a great group of people, but like any project that I've worked on in my career, you just put your best foot forward, and you're all working together to make the best movie possible.

Thomas Ian Nicholas

#22. Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the Moon. OK, you say, but why? Well, he wants to be the first American to get divorced on the Moon.

David Letterman

#23. George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose "Woodcraft," published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.

John McPhee

#24. Most Americans are unaware that Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to go to war against radical Islam. Jefferson was very concerned with Islam's war-like doctrine and its inability to separate mosque and state.

Brad Thor

#25. Ever since the first 'American Pie,' I've always been happy to just have an opportunity, I just didn't think it was going to be with comedies. Now I really like it.

Sean William Scott

#26. '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

#27. I'm the first American designer who went all over the world.

Oleg Cassini

#28. One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure about both the solo show and the book is that it tells people about my dad. He really was an important man. He was a kind of pioneer of regional theater. He was the first American producer to ever produce all of Shakespeare plays.

John Lithgow

#29. The moment the first American soldier sets foot on the Japanese mainland, all prisoners of war will be shot.

Hideki Tojo

#30. Elizabeth Blackwell, "with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value," found herself in the "unknown world" of Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor - the first American woman to have become a doctor.

David McCullough

#31. Reaching that windswept perch, I decided, would cleanse my spirit and heal my wounds. More than that, it would send me home with a title: The First American Woman to Climb Everest.

Stacy Allison

#32. Yes, I did feel a special responsibility to be the first American woman in space.

Sally Ride

#33. Woodrow Wilson was the first American president ever to leave the country during his term of office.

Ken Follett

#34. My national identity is first American. My religious identity is first Muslim.

Dalia Mogahed

#35. In 1847, two years before the greedy rush for gold began in California, the Mormons quietly began irrigating Utah's Salt Lake Valley. In a sense, they were the first American irrigators of any significance. And their knowledge about the art of applying water to land has spread throughout the world.

Stuart Campbell

#36. MYTH 175. | George Washington was the first president of America. Peyton Randolph was the first American President but he was forgotten due to a technicality. When he was President, the United States was called The United Colonies of America.

John Brown

#37. The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First.

John Sergeant Wise

#38. We were with Hayden Schlossberg enormous fans of that first American Pie. We were in college when it came out, and we watched it over and over and over again.

Jon Hurwitz

#39. The first American insurance company was the Friendly Society for the Mutual Insurance of Houses Against Fire, founded in Charles Town in South Carolina, in 1735.

Andrew Tobias

#40. I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, "I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder."

Martin Rees

#41. Please, dear Lord, don't let me f*** up. - ALAN SHEPARD, first American in space, seconds before liftoff

Eric Greitens

#42. Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol-type program, a radio show called 'Major Bowes' Amateur Hour.' The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19.

Tony Bennett

#43. 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

#44. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

#45. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.

P.J. Parker

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. With all her heart, Mom believed in opportunity for everyone and privilege for no one. She put her children first, and her faith and trust in the American dream.

Ralph Webster

#50. Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

Michael Mandelbaum

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. We must display a heart for every American, and a special passion for those still on the first rung of life's ladder.

Mitch Daniels

#54. For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end ... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

C. Wright Mills

#55. 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

#56. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Nick Joaquin

#57. The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
(Adlai E. Stevenson, 1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician)

Adlai E. Stevenson II

#58. The best thing about being President is that it gets you out of American life. I don't know what the theory is behind this, but it is a fact. The first thing we do with a President is shunt him off to a siding where nothing American can ever happen to him.

Russell Baker

#59. We are first among the nations in per capita giving: it would take three Frenchmen, seven Germans, or fourteen Italians to equal the charitable donations of one American.

Parker J. Palmer

#60. The American fantasy of love is the 'meet-cute,' 'Love at first sight,' and 'You had me at hello!' The completely spontaneous version of accidental love, which doesn't care about demographics and social compatibility.

Susan Straight

#61. Once the fire from the retaliatory strike dies down, the American people are going to find out that it is the Clinton Administration's wrongheaded policies that resulted in the creation of this terrorist haven in Afghanistan in the first place.

Dana Rohrabacher

#62. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#63. When I first tried the American accent, for a moment I thought I could never be an actor because I just could not do it. But then I thought, 'Okay, it'll just be something that I work at until I get it.'

Margot Robbie

#64. 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

#65. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

James McBride

#66. It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.

Tony Judt

#67. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.

P.J. Parker

#68. Today, President Barack Obama promised to 'detect and pursue' American tax evaders, as opposed to his first 100 days, in which he detected and nominated American tax evaders.

Jay Leno

#69. In 1850, one in four American babies died before his or her first birthday.

Martin J. Blaser

#70. The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

Dave Barry

#71. My mother is Greek and my father is Bulgarian. I am a first-generation American and native Los Angeleno. I was born and raised in Hollywood.

Rita Wilson

#72. 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

#73. There are individuals who are working very hard to promote fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It's fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have. Obama's father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#74. We cannot get serious about helping the private sector create quality jobs without focusing first on the main drivers of our economy - the American middle class and those struggling to enter it.

Paul Tonko

#75. In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public.

Frank Church

#76. No American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found guilty of a crime by a court.

Rand Paul

#77. We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

William J. Clinton

#78. When I founded the first Hard Rock, no one was serving American food in London; McDonald's wasn't there, Burger King, etc.

Peter Morton

#79. The very first words that we, the American nation, spoke were right here in Philadelphia. You know those words: "We the people." It wasn't, "We the conglomerates." It wasn't, "We the corporations." It was, "We the people.

Al Gore

#80. Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.

Bernice L. McFadden

#81. I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first, I wanted to work in the theatre, but there was something about the ambience of film, especially American films, that always attracted me.

Jean Reno

#82. Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon's exit and Mr. Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

Scott Shane

#83. In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan "America First," which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany.

Timothy Snyder

#84. I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.

David H. Koch

#85. Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.

Bill Bryson

#86. The first time I saw America was from my perch on the mast of a Spanish naval ship, where I could spot the Statue of Liberty reaching proudly into the open, endless American sky.

Jose Andres

#87. American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.

Margaret Halsey

#88. It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.

Fareed Zakaria

#89. I speak Swedish, it's my first language. Of course, growing up with Latin American parents from Argentina, I also have some other influences from other cultures. But Sweden is where I feel the most at home.

Jose Gonzalez

#90. In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.'

Allen West

#91. I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

Maya Lin

#92. When I'm making an American film, it's more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, 'What are you doing!? Tell me first!' There are so many restrictions.

Jackie Chan

#93. My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.

Sherman Alexie

#94. We must give the American worker the first option of ownership.

Jesse Jackson

#95. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.

Ian Anderson

#96. For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married. What

Aziz Ansari

#97. I'm a big fan of small business ownership. I think it's the backbone of American innovation. But to be successful, you first have to have the courage to go for it.

Bill Rancic

#98. I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I've been using them throughout my career, but they've never taken center stage, they've never been really powerful, they've never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.

Tess Gerritsen

#99. 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

#100. I love rapping. I do. My styling's similar to Missy Elliott - I think she's so dope. In a weird way, that's how I first learned the American accent: doing American rap songs.

Rebel Wilson