Quotes · Skopia

17 quotes

The Great Escape · 1963

★ 1.1

America is a nation created by all the hopeful wanderers of Europe, not out of geography and genetics, but out of purpose.

Theodore H. White

1961

★ 1.8

Essay

We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough... We have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Gretel Ehrlich

1985

★ 1.8

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

General George S. Patton

Patton · 1969

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

We are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and in our own union. We believe that every man must some day be free.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Second Inaugural Address of Lyndon Baines Johnson · 1965

★ 1.9

Interview · Magazine

Some sense of religious mission is part of being American.

John Updike

The New York Review of Books · 1996

★ 1.9

Political literature

I have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the Americans than in the manner in which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their Federal Constitution.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 2.9

Novel

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before... Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged · 1957

★ 3.7

Speech · Political speech

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes, we can. It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land.

Barack Obama

2008

★ 3.7

TV program · Comedy (TV) · Comedy

I am going to consume all of this at the same time because I am a free American.

Ron Swanson

Parks and Recreation · 2010

★ 3.7

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.

D.H. Lawrence

1923

★ 4.5

Speech · Political speech

For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that's sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Second Inaugural Address of Lyndon Baines Johnson · 1965

★ 4.5

Political literature

They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 4.5

Historical literature

A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Samuel Eliot Morison

1921

★ 5.0

Speech

The chief business of the American people is business.

Calvin Coolidge

1925

★ 5.3

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.

George S. Patton

Patton · 1969

★ 5.3

Political literature

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

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