Quotes About American Values

#1. It's important for American soldiers to be culturally sensitive when deployed in foreign countries. But it's just as important for the U.S. never to renounce the most fundamental American values, which, after all, are also universal values.

Gary Bauer

#2. For much of America, the all-American values depicted in Norman Rockwell's classic illustrations are idealistic. For those of us from Vermont, they're realistic. That's what we do.

Bernie Sanders

#3. American values are not just about America, but they speak to the human dignity, the God-given spark that resides in each and every person across the world.

Hillary Clinton

#4. American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.

Barack Obama

#5. We need to inject some old-fashioned American values and common-sense, practical thinking into our energy policy.

Michael Bloomberg

#6. Americans are very easygoing people. If the added attention and great visibility that I have been able to generate can help open doors and expose more Chinese to American values and the American way of life, that is great.

Gary Locke

#7. I love the idea of a beautiful neighborhood that represents the very best of American values, but also as a fun backdrop to some darker, deliciously sneaky things going on in people's lives.

Marc Cherry

#8. For me, I think being a conservative means you are focused on all four key principles: strong defense, lower taxes, less spending, and defending traditional American values.

Jim Jordan

#9. We need to end permanently the tax that punishes American values of savings and investment and of building small businesses and family farms and ranches.

Kit Bond

#10. Those aren't the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.

Barack Obama

#11. I am an undiluted admirer of American values and the American dream and I believe they will continue to inspire not just the people of the United States but millions across the face of the globe.

Margaret Thatcher

#12. Our government leaders ... have made many mistakes in the past when they have lost sight of the sacred American values rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are at the brink of even graver mistakes and assaults on these values.

Samuel Dash

#13. I like to call the ethos I grew up with 'Oklahoma values.' But you'd be just as accurate if you said 'American values.' Except for our lack of a seacoast, Oklahoma has a little bit of just about everything that's American.

J. C. Watts

#14. United States Government needs to acknowledge and respect our sovereignty, treaties, traditional Native American values, and our human rights as a people, which under the law as written we deserve, and which should be protected.

Leonard Peltier

#15. We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values.

Joe Biden

#16. We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might.

Theodore C. Sorensen

#17. I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition.

Mark Shields

#18. The Bush-Cheney administration had betrayed some basic American values. So there was hunger for change.

Al Gore

#19. Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values
racism, militarism, capitalism
all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.

Robin Morgan

#20. So he started writing these novels set in Small Town Georgia about folks with Good American Values who Fall in Love and then contract Life-Threatening Diseases and Die. I'm

Stephanie Perkins

#21. In the secular trinity of Irish-American values, loyalty and humor are father and son. Self-deprecation is the spirit that works in mysterious ways ...

Maureen Dezell

#22. America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself
from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence.

Kalle Lasn

#23. You know, I think it's so ironic that we're calling hard work, striving for excellence, don't blame others, you know, don't give up, that we're calling these, quote, 'Chinese values,' 'cause I always thought of them as American values.

Amy Chua

#24. I want people to hear what I think about these foundational American values of personal responsibility, resilience, family and faith, there are things that people can learn from somebody who leads a state like Ohio which is, frankly, a microcosm of the country.

John Kasich

#25. I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

Adrian Lyne

#26. My mother told me if I work hard and I really believed in American principles and I believed in God, anything is possible. That's why I'm not anxious to give away American values and principles for the sake of political correctness.

Benjamin Carson

#27. I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be ... but God clearly says, those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.

John Green

#28. I make no apologies for us wanting to do this [bombing Iraq and Syria] appropriately and in a way that is consistent with American values.

Barack Obama

#29. How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is let's make this a true land of opportunity.

Laurene Powell Jobs

#30. It is crucial that civil liberties in this country be preserved otherwise the terrorists will win the battle against American values without firing another shot.

Russ Feingold

#31. Every age has found some alternative to American values appealing. The number of Western intellectuals enamored of fascism and all the various expressions of Marxism was legion.

Dennis Prager

#32. 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

#33. Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.

Rick Santorum

#34. Because extroversion lines up so well with American values, we introverts often deprive ourselves of what we most enjoy and thrive on. So, for all of you who draw energy from inside, behind, underneath, or away from it all, welcome home.

Laurie A. Helgoe

#35. Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.

August Wilson

#36. President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and undermining American values.

George Soros

#37. On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

#38. Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.

George Carlin

#39. Iran is not a make-believe country. It is a real country populated by some 75 million people - real people; including, I daresay, a majority who are philosophically and by education inclined toward the modern, secular world, and particularly American values.

Bob Barr

#40. I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

Gary Locke

#41. The American nuclear family made America great, but few are now defending it against forces determined to destroy it. If America continues to have many immigrants with different family types, we are less likely to maintain American values of personal freedom, individualism, and limited government.

Phyllis Schlafly

#42. In my book I don't just demonstrate that free enterprise is the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is. I also show that it's an expression of American values, and, thus, that a fight for free enterprise is very much a fight for our culture.

Arthur C. Brooks

#43. Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Jimmy Carter

#44. It is easy to respect secular Americans who hold fast to the Constitution and to American values generally. And any one of us who believes in God can understand why some people, given all the unjust suffering in the world, just cannot believe that there is a Providential Being.

Dennis Prager

#45. Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.

William Fulton

#46. 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

#47. The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars - whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.

Yuval Levin

#48. At a time when the American family is threatened as never before, redefining it away from the union of one man and one woman only promises to weaken it as a child-rearing, values-conveying institution.

Marco Rubio

#49. Budgets are moral documents. Federal funding should reflect the priorities and the values of the majority of the American people.

Mike Pence

#50. All of my Polynesian counterparts in the NFL with roots in American Samoa understand how the values embedded in our South Pacific culture - community, hard work, perseverance, respect - contribute directly to our success.

Troy Polamalu

#51. Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#52. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.

Tiffany Madison

#53. Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values ... holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change ...

George Mason

#54. I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.

Roger Ebert

#55. Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a "women's culture" with its own customs, values and even language.

Kittredge Cherry

#56. And one of the most important values of Barack Obama is that he will always level with the American people.

Charlie Gonzalez

#57. Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.

Henry A. Kissinger

#58. We don't have to apologize for American exceptionalism or western values.

Rick Perry

#59. A person can be religious and still respect secular values and not talk about Jesus all the time as though every American believed in Jesus.

Susan Jacoby

#60. Unfortunately, many talented people in Hollywood find their values and politics do not reflect the content they create, and many movie themes are in direct contrast with over half of today's American families.

Allen Covert

#61. We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.

David Mamet

#62. We need to get over that myth. There was nothing Judeo-Christian about American history. Nobody liked Catholics and Jews. It's Anglo-Protestant values, not Judeo-Christian values. Even Maryland very quickly stopped being so Catholic-friendly.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#63. It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.

Russell Means

#64. The American principles of democracy expresses the deepest values of the Sharia both structurally and in the government ... Sharia requires us Muslims anywhere to abide by the law of the land.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#65. And we should be a welcoming nation. Our identity is not based on race or ethnicity, it's based on a set of shared values. That's American citizenship.

Jeb Bush

#66. That is our generation's task, to make these works, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

Barack Obama

#67. We need not throw away 200 years of American jurisprudence while we fight terrorism. We need not choose between our most deeply held values, and keeping this nation safe.

Barack Obama

#68. I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper grey censorship of all our real human values ...

Jack Kerouac

#69. Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

Edward Hirsch

#70. My administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.

Barack Obama

#71. The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

Jeanine Basinger

#72. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.

Ishmael Reed

#73. We will continue to deepen our engagement using every element of American power - diplomacy, military, economic development, the power of our values and our ideals.

Barack Obama

#74. The problem is that everywhere the gas drilling industry goes, a trail of water contamination, air pollution, health concerns and betrayal of basic American civic and community values follows.

Josh Fox

#75. Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics.

Dennis Prager

#76. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world.

Molly Ivins

#77. The danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that hardly troubles us.

Richard Hofstadter

#78. The American people can be - and deserve to be - assured that actions taken in their defense are consistent with their values and their laws.

Eric Holder

#79. To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.

Noam Chomsky

#80. When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

James Hillman

#81. America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its "dream" from Native Americans.

Paula Gunn Allen

#82. The American Indian, once proud and free, is torn now between White and tribal values; between the politics and language of the White man and his own historic culture. His problems, sharpened by years of defeat and exploitation, neglect and inadequate effort, will take many years to overcome.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#83. The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred.

Adrian Cronauer

#84. In the minds and hearts of the American people, there is a great hunger for peace based on a universal recognition of the values of freedom and human dignity.

Hubert H. Humphrey

#85. If a child hasn't been given spiritual values within the family setting, they have no familiarity with the values that are necessary for the just and peaceful functioning in society.

Eunice Baumann-Nelson Ph.D PENOBSCOT

#86. It is a mistake to apply American democratic procedures to the faith and the truth. You cannot take a vote on the truth. The value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes.

Pope John Paul II

#87. I didn't come to Washington to fight against my Republican colleagues, or even against my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I came to Washington to fight for the values that make our country unique - for the economic freedom that gives life to the American Dream.

David Schweikert

#88. There will never be another Ed Koch. He was an original, but he represented a significant, if shrinking, segment of American Jewry who refused to compromise their liberal values, their support for Israel or their Jewish pride.

Alan Dershowitz

#89. I think I'm the best candidate not just to beat President Obama, but to do what is necessary to get this country going, a conviction conservative who can rally the American public around a common set of values.

Rick Santorum

#90. The American experience works when people embrace a set of shared values, you come, you work hard, you embrace these values and you're as American as anybody that came on the Mayflower.

Jeb Bush

#91. Latin life is rich with warmth, family values and history. I want to bring that beauty into American homes.

Cristina Saralegui

#92. Seventy-six percent of the American people say we have a spiritual problem in our country. That's great, because now they understand the root of the problem is not that we haven't passed enough laws; rather, the root of the problem is in terms of our social value system.

Charles Colson

#93. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.

Wynton Marsalis

#94. Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.

Parker Palmer

#95. We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel, and between the American and Israeli people. We share common values and a commitment to a democratic future for the world, and we are both committed to a two-state solution. But that doesn't mean that we're going to agree.

Hillary Clinton

#96. These are facts that would make every American upset. Our birthright is being stolen, the legacy of our country is at stake, and the values of our nation are in peril. The future whispers, and the present shouts.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#97. Black history isn't a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.

Karyn Parsons

#98. I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.

Bruce Feiler

#99. President Obama's approach embodies the values, the ideas, and the direction America must take to build a 21st century version of the American Dream in a nation of shared opportunities, shared prosperity and shared responsibilities.

William J. Clinton

#100. The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.

Glenn Greenwald