Idea Of America Quotes

#1. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past.

Vijay Iyer

#2. respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.

A.A. Gill

#3. We must restore the emotional relationship that people have to the idea of America, that no matter where you come from, no matter where you live, that you have access to the same opportunities that somebody who is born in privilege.

Howard Schultz

#4. The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it is because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong.

Barack Obama

#5. The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is

Andy Warhol

#6. And so I think that the idea of America working with other countries to solve problems is good for us, and it is part of digging us out of the 'my way or the highway' approach that was evident in the previous eight years.

Madeleine Albright

#7. Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.

P. J. O'Rourke

#8. The idea of America's religious groups fighting over the limited public money to be made available takes us down the road towards the kind of sectarian competition that has torn so many nations apart, and which our separation of church and state has spared us.

David Saperstein

#9. The idea of America, where emigrants could meld with others in the great classless pot called the United States. Did it work, really?

Nancy Horan

#10. There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.

Quentin Tarantino

#11. I've got the courage to apply our conservative principles. I can't do it alone. With your help, with God's grace, we can save the idea of America before it's too late.

Bobby Jindal

#12. Vegas represents the idea of America I had as a kid. The big cars, the pretty girls; everything is possible in Vegas.

Joel Robuchon

#13. In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China - execution is.

Ma Huateng

#14. Entrepreneurs embody the promise of America: the idea that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard and see it through, you can succeed in this country. And in fulfilling this promise, entrepreneurs also play a critical role in expanding our economy and creating jobs.

Barack Obama

#15. I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

Tom Waits

#16. We must get away from the idea that America is to be the leader of the world in everything.

Francis John McConnell

#17. In America people have this funny idea about enlightenment and money. Money expresses a level of commitment. Studying enlightenment is like going to a university.

Frederick Lenz

#18. Discourse has ended in America. It's all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They're just rocking with laughter night and day.

Felix Dennis

#19. I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

Rick Santorum

#20. So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.

Henry Rollins

#21. In America idea of freedom isn't actually about freedom. That's about power. The point of an artist is to find out what are the flavors that I must work with. Finding one's freedom is about surrendering to your helplessness.

Chris Martin

#22. In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.

Clint Eastwood

#23. I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families. So, we were interested in the idea of what the extreme version of that would be.

Zal Batmanglij

#24. We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#25. In most circles, the idea of economic planning has been in disrepute most of the time and, particularly in America, has almost carried connotations of intellectual and moral perversion and even political subversion.

Gunnar Myrdal

#26. Perception has always interested me. The idea thatbehind every face, there are a thousand faces. Beneath the placidveneer of middle America, there lies terror.

Bryan Singer

#27. You're in America now," I said. "Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you'd prefer.

Jim Butcher

#28. I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.

M. Ward

#29. Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.

Wendy Kopp

#30. America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

Simon Schama

#31. 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

#32. I uprooted my life from Australia and came over to America with the idea of pursuing my acting career. I wasn't really sure where I would end up. I threw caution to the wind.

Penelope Mitchell

#33. The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

Max Lerner

#34. Only a war that serves no conceivable national interest gets the New York Time's endorsement. Liberals warm to the idea of American mothers weeping for their sons, but only if their deaths will not make America any safer.

Ann Coulter

#35. Bra-burning never happened. It was completely made up by the media. A couple of women protesting a Miss America pageant threw some bras into a garbage can, and somehow that became this longstanding idea of feminists as bra-burners.

Jessica Valenti

#36. When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got - you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by the corporate mono-culture there is so pervasive.

Robert Crumb

#37. America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.

Edmund White

#38. Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy - and somehow still expect to prosper. That idea was flat wrong. Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services.

Jeffrey R. Immelt

#39. We are very puritan in America. We still hold true to these really antiquated values, this idea of the sanctity of marriage.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#40. White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

John Ridley

#41. You can't kill America. We're more than a nation. We're a notion. We're an idea. The American Dream. You never heard of the Afghanistani Dream have you. Except by bearded hermetic recluses with a fetish for uneducated women dressed as giant shuttlecocks.

Will Durst

#42. I haven't got the time to sit here arguing with someone whose idea of a coherent foreign policy is what comes up in Google when you type in peace!

Tony Blair

#43. You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

Jerry Garcia

#44. A lot of the Indians who came to North America in the '70s, and who made very successful adjustments, always had an idea of the India that they had left, not realizing that the India that they had left has changed more profoundly than the America they came to.

Clark Blaise

#45. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#46. There is this idea that it's very different from the French point of view to work in America blah, blah, blah. But I think it's different from one person to the other, not from one country to the other.

Vincent Cassel

#47. I have no idea how I'm perceived in America because I don't live the reality of America.

Monica Bellucci

#48. Herman Cain is out there, he says a lot of provocative things. He said America should build its own Great Wall of China. Cain says it's a great idea because if there's one thing you don't see in China, it's Mexicans.

Conan O'Brien

#49. I was really across-the-board, like a nutcase. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I just did everything. I was even part of FHA, Future Homemakers of America. How lost was I?

Jayma Mays

#50. In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.

Mark Twain

#51. Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.

Jimmy Carter

#52. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society.

Fred Reed

#53. It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle.

Martin Amis

#54. When I think of invention, I always think of America. You're always seeing ads: 'Have you got the next big idea?' There seems to be that spirit in America of inventions and inventors.

Simon Cowell

#55. The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

Stephen King

#56. America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.

Charles M. Blow

#57. There's probably no concept in theology more repugnant to modern America than the idea of divine wrath.

R.C. Sproul

#58. When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

Anna Deavere Smith

#59. I enjoy that, and the idea of doing small things over a period of time. I think there are certain things you can do for water control in America, because that will be our most precious resource. In America, you pay more for water than you do for gas.

Robin Williams

#60. In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

Joseph Brodsky

#61. Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores, and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world
our new world.

George H. W. Bush

#62. The ultimate idea of rags-to-riches success in America is the Hollywood movie star.

Marin Ireland

#63. We are hated because we are free. We are hated because of the idea that is the United States of America. We are hated because of our Constitution.

Rush Limbaugh

#64. The thing is, in America, it just seemed ridiculous - I mean, the idea of having a hit record over there, ... It was just something you could never do.

John Lennon

#65. I have never written that there is a threat of fascism in America. I always considered the idea overwrought. But now I believe there really is such a threat - and it will come draped not in an American flag, but in the name of tolerance and health.

Dennis Prager

#66. What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.

Ian MacKaye

#67. War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He

Barry Eisler

#68. If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea,

Wallace Stegner

#69. I've always loved New York City and the idea of a cultural exchange: the immigrants coming to America.

Mimi Kennedy

#70. You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.

Tony Kushner

#71. I guess I just don't see America as separate from Vietnam or Ethiopia. This mentality of 'our team's better than yours' - it's a high school idea. My kids don't see those dividing lines, and I don't want to either.

Brad Pitt

#72. We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.

Stephen Colbert

#73. Days of yore when America was no more than a strip of land stretching a couple hundred miles west of the Atlantic and the rest was just a very compelling idea.

Charles Frazier

#74. I'm especially baffled by the idea of taking insurance against a U.S. default. If America defaults, we're talking about a chaotic world - Mad Max, more or less - in which case, who imagines that insurance claims will be honored?

Paul Krugman

#75. The mass migration of the poorest of the poor to America is bad for the whole country, but it's fantastic for Democrats. Ask yourself: Which party benefits from illiterate non-English speakers who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for, but can be instructed to learn certain symbols?

Ann Coulter

#76. So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was - but I wanted to be there.

Aasif Mandvi

#77. It's very important who the president of the United States is. America is a great idea, so that's why it's a great country.

Fran Lebowitz

#78. The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.

Patrick Marnham

#79. I created 'America's Next Top Model' one-hundred percent. I was in my kitchen making tea one morning, and I looked out the window, and the idea popped into my head. I wanted it to be 'American Idol' meets 'Ford Supermodel of the Year' meets 'The Real World.'

Tyra Banks

#80. It was not easy victory in the America Cup. Our boys spent years experimenting with different designs for their boat before they came up with the innovative idea of having a submerged nuclear submarine tow it.

Dave Barry

#81. America, 5 years after this brutal attack, is testament that a Nation conceived in liberty and equality will endure. It is a triumph of millions of Americans but it is also the triumph of an idea larger than any one person, larger than any one nation.

Nick Rahall

#82. I am self-conscious, and I'm aware of my body. But I struggle with America's limited idea of what perfection is.

Rene Russo

#83. Our country is a place where hope can be born and great companies, organizations and non-profits can spring up from an idea birthed on the back of a coffee-shop napkin.

Todd Stocker

#84. Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: Take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

George Carlin

#85. America, the Idea of: We yearned for its beer and jazz, its smoke-filled nightclubs, its Edward Hopper bars, the melancholy of rainy Manhattan Gershwin nights ... the America we yearned for has gone. Did it ever exist?

Michael Bywater

#86. So I was in America and I thought I'll stick around while I'm here and just see what happens. The next film I did was High Art, so I guess it started with a sort of vague idea but really just a fantasy.

Radha Mitchell

#87. No one has any idea what's next ... the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it's delaying the recovery.

Steve Wynn

#88. During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

Amin Maalouf

#89. In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism - this idea of my own personal fulfillment.

Aasif Mandvi

#90. Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

Whoopi Goldberg

#91. This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

Tavis Smiley

#92. America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

Max Lerner

#93. I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness).

Paul Theroux

#94. Bill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas.

Charlie Pierce

#95. Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

James A. Michener

#96. One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on.

Jeff Goodell

#97. Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.

Eileen Myles

#98. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.

Jack Kerouac

#99. America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.

Jamaica Kincaid

#100. I went to America with a very specific idea of what I wanted to do.

Rupert Sanders