Top 100 Old American Quotes
#1. Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
Malcolm Gladwell
#2. Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.
Suze Orman
#3. Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
Philip Caputo
#4. The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
Archibald MacLeish
#6. Ever wonder why the media never refers to 18 or 19 year old American soldiers as "armed teens"?
Stefan Molyneux
#7. Washburn's an old American name, but this one was assembled overseas.
John Fogerty
#8. In another show of America's force to the world, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Carter responded by boycotting the Olympics. And thus was a fearsome blow struck at little fourteen-year-old American girls who had spent their lives training for the Olympics.
Ann Coulter
#9. There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Vladimir Nabokov
#10. The advantage of the free market system is that people invest their capital, they create jobs by investing their capital, and hopefully they get a return on that investment. I don't think there's anything wrong with good old American capitalism.
Steve Stivers
#11. I guess, on my list, going back to some old American stuff and British stuff that I used to love in the '80s, would be a British show called Dad's Army, which recently just turned into a movie.
Rhys Darby
#12. What are this blind dates?' he asked curiously .
'An old American institution of mismating.
Rona Jaffe
#13. It would serve the Americans right if we emptied the prisons and let the subversives take power. They'd soon show Washington just how much they appreciate good old American values.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
#14. John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old American studying in Pakistan, was captured in Northern Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban. Experts call it the worst semester abroad program ever.
Jimmy Fallon
#15. I have one of those real old American built cars. The kind that just PUNCHES through accidents.
Kevin Rooney
#16. I like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in the old American movies when drivers don't watch the road.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
#17. 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
#18. Butt fucking the American dream so you can buy cheap T-shirts at Old Navy. Isn't life beautiful?
Shane Kuhn
#19. 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
#20. Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.
Jerry Falwell
#21. My friends call my style 'old man chic.' I wear loafers and stylish sweatpants. I love to stay comfortable, so I definitely funk it up, but I'm always comfortable. I wear lots of hats and feathers, and I kind of have a little obsession with Native American jewelry.
Hayley Kiyoko
#22. I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism.
Frank Deford
#23. With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center.
Rich Cohen
#24. 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
#25. The stupa is a white dome with a conical stone tower emerging from its center. There are two eyes painted on the tower, the all seeing eyes of Buddha. They're purple, and look a little sinister, like an Old Testament Buddha.
Joshua Isard
#26. I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
Ayad Akhtar
#27. When I was five, we moved to Virginia and lived inside an old fort that was surrounded by a moat. So when I heard stories of American history, I felt as if those dramas were taking place right in my own backyard.
Mary Pope Osborne
#28. You know this old style of American family series? Well, I sit there and cry.
Graham Kennedy
#29. We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.
Barack Obama
#30. by the 1790's an average American over fifteen years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year. . . . The comparable modern average is less than 2.9 gallons per capita. We
Christopher Collier
#31. My grandfather always told me, 'You know you're American first, but you're a Greek-American, which makes you a better American.' It sounds sort of old-world and very sweet, but what he meant was that you should embrace those things that are most special and different about you.
Melina Kanakaredes
#32. Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena's recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times - on her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.
S.B. Redd
#33. You know that just before that first Thanksgiving dinner there was one wise, old Native American woman saying, Don't feed them. If you feed them, they'll never leave.
Dylan Brody
#34. In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from.
Homaro Cantu
#35. I love America for its bourgeois comfort. If I was as heavily in debt as they are, I wouldn't be drinking tea or coffee anywhere. I would be sipping tap water from an old bottle and serving others tea or coffee in a cafe somewhere.
Vann Chow
#36. I was an 18-year-old kid, and I was in the heart of things in Washington. My interest in American politics and, particularly, the Kennedys, began then.
Nigel Hamilton
#37. One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.
Atul Gawande
#38. Bye, Bye Miss American Pie, drove my chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. Good old boys drinking whiskey and rye, singing, this'll be the day that I die.
Don McLean
#39. The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#40. I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.
P. J. O'Rourke
#41. American women often fall into the trap of, 'Oh, these are my weekend clothes. These are my work clothes. This is what I wear at night.' It's so old-fashioned.
Michael Kors
#42. A legend is an old man with a cane ...
Miles Davis
#43. College football today is one of the last great strongholds of genuine old-fashioned American hypocrisy.
Noel Gallagher
#44. Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American.
Luther Standing Bear
#45. 'American Idol' was fun; it was definitely an experience. I was 16 years old when I did it, and I was curious about how I would do on the show.
Tori Kelly
#46. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.
Nathan Huggins
#47. We're looking at ideas to remodel Arrowhead Stadium. It's 30 years old and it's not a good American soccer stadium. We're looking at ways to improve Arrowhead-which is oriented for NFL games
for our spectators.
Lamar Hunt
#48. If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.
Karl Rove
#49. Young lovers seek perfection. Old lovers learn the art of sewing shreds together. And of seeing beauty in a multiplicity of patches. - How to make an American Quilt
Anonymous
#50. What did I want with prestige? The British Open paid the winner $600 in American money. A man would have to be two hundred years old at that rate to retire from golf.
Sam Snead
#51. I've been playing American football since I was six years old. I was a captain of my high school team, playing strong safety.
Gabriel Luna
#52. American audiences love period pieces. America doesn't have a lot of old things. It's a new country so I think we're a little bit fascinated by that.
Channing Tatum
#53. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.
George Packer
#55. Women would be disproportionately affected by the privatization of social security. It is one of the most important safety nets for American women in old age, or in times of disability, to insure financial income for their families.
Barbara Mikulski
#56. We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.
Oswald Mosley
#57. By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go ... .Miss Leefolt, she'd narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that's the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns
Kathryn Stockett
#58. The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.
Rupert Everett
#59. 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
#60. There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place - 'gracious living' and all that stuff.
Vladimir Nabokov
#61. American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.
Camille Paglia
#62. We live, we die, and like the grass and trees, renew ourselves from the soft earth of the grave. Stones crumble and decay, faiths grow old and they are forgotten, but new beliefs are born. The faith of the villages is dust now ... but it will grow again ... like the trees.
Chief Joseph
#63. When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding - that, for me, was the American Dream.
Renzo Rosso
#64. I started to study the flute in 1951. The flute has been utilized by African-American musicians as far back as the early Twenties. If you take a look at some of the old pictures of Chick Webb, then you will see the flute right there on the bandstand among the woodwinds.
Yusef Lateef
#65. The big winners under the American fiscal system are the rich, who pay some of the lowest taxes anywhere in the world; the old, who are the main beneficiaries of the American social service state; farmers, rural people. These are Republican constituencies.
David Frum
#66. Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.
Siri Hustvedt
#67. Gap was essentially the American wardrobe that was well-priced, and it was attractive, and it was happy, and it had great color, and it has jeans, and I think we did the same with Old Navy. And I think we do the same with J.Crew at a much higher level, Madewell at another level.
Mickey Drexler
#68. James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.
Jon Landau
#69. Children born to-day may see the beginnings of a genuine state church in the Republic, with a hierarchy of live wires and a purely American theology. I regret that I am too old to wait for it, for if it comes it will be a lulu.
H.L. Mencken
#70. In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn't find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O'Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.
Yayoi Kusama
#71. I was 16-years-old when I appeared on 'American Idol,' and the show was my boot camp. It was a crazy, stressful at times, experience.
Jessica Sanchez
#72. In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.
Joseph J. Ellis
#73. 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
#74. In France, if you have any sort of talent, you'd better keep it here. And if you're going to go abroad, it had better not be America. The old battle - American versus Frog cinema. It's ridiculous.
Jean Reno
#75. There is a terrible garrulousness in most American writing, legacy of the old Frontier.
Gore Vidal
#76. I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.
Kurt Vonnegut
#77. If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.
Anderson Cooper
#78. There is a homely old adage which runs: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.
Theodore Roosevelt
#79. I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.
Kurt Vonnegut
#80. I am convinced that America can be turned around if we will all get serious about the Master's business. It may be late, but it is never too late to do what is right. We need an old-fashioned, God-honoring, Christ-exalting revival to turn American back to God. America can be saved!
Jerry Falwell
#81. Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.
Evan Bayh
#82. I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.
John C. Reilly
#83. No two children learn in the same way. While we might agree that every American eight-year-old should be able to read and multiply, beyond those basics, there are few reasons to make every student follow the same path.
John Katzman
#84. 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
#85. American Girls and American Guys
We'll always stand up and salute
We'll always recognize
When we see Old Glory Flying
There's a lot of men dead
So we can sleep in peace at night
When we lay down our head.
Toby Keith
#86. New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
#87. When you get real old, honey, you realize there are certain things that just don't matter anymore. You lay it all on the table. There's a saying, 'Only little children and old folks tell the truth.'
Sarah Louise Delany
#88. There is an old and very wise Native American saying: Every time you point a finger in scorn - there are three remaining fingers pointing right back at you.
Alyson Noel
#89. While American men are fighting to rid the old world of autocracy let American women set to and rid the new world of this intolerable old burden of sex ignorance.
Crystal Eastman
#90. If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out; we can't just drill our way out; we can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together.
Donald Sadoway
#91. It's funny because ever since 'American Idol,' people look at me without makeup and think I'm 15 years old - they think I'm really young and quiet and shy, and that I've never been in a relationship and have never been in love or anything.
Candice Glover
#92. As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.
Jon Landau
#93. For Liz, all American men were divided into two classes: those who treated you as if you were a frail old lady, and those who treated you as if you were just frail.
Josephine Tey
#94. This is not our fight', the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan ... Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You'll find it.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#95. Song for the Puberty Rite of a Girl Named Cowaka:
A poor man takes the songs in his hand
And drops them near the place where the sun sets.
See, Cowaka, run to them and take them in your hand,
And place them under the sunset.
Frances Densmore
#96. We only have one dog now. Calamity Jane had to be put down. She was very old, and her medicine no longer controlled her seizures. Dilly is five now, I think. He's a neutered American Pit Bull Terrier, very gentle, about the color of buckskin.
Gene Wolfe
#97. Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I'm old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.
Robert David Hall
#98. Low oil prices played a part in a major move by Congress voting to end the 40-year-old ban on exporting American crude oil.
Ari Shapiro
#99. Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
Gerry Spence
#100. Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.
Ernest Hemingway,
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
