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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Alexis de Tocqueville3 quotes
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 · 1840They 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in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.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 · 1835I 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 · 1835Lyndon B. Johnson2 quotes
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 · 1965We 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 · 1965Ayn Rand1 quote
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 · 1957Barack Obama1 quote
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 · 2008Calvin Coolidge1 quote
The chief business of the American people is business. — Calvin Coolidge · 1925D.H. Lawrence1 quote
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. — D.H. Lawrence · 1923General George S. Patton1 quote
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 · 1969George S. Patton1 quote
Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. — George S. Patton · 1969Gretel Ehrlich1 quote
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 · 1985John Updike1 quote
Some sense of religious mission is part of being American. — John Updike · 1996Ron Swanson1 quote
I am going to consume all of this at the same time because I am a free American. — Ron Swanson · 2010Samuel Eliot Morison1 quote
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 · 1921Theodore H. White1 quote
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 · 1961Von Luger 'The Kommandant'1 quote
Are all American officers so ill-mannered? — Von Luger 'The Kommandant' · 1963