c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
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, Shanghai Nobody
We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Dear Non-Black American,when you comes to the United States, you become black.No matter of your origin. Stop saying you are Liberian, Jamaican, Belizean, Nigerian,South African or Ghanaian. White America doesn't care about all that bull, that's why on the work application it doesn't give you the option to say Ghanaian or Jamaican, it says "African American.
— Henry Johnson Jr
Like this quote if you believe you're a Patriot!
— Dillinger Cobb
The reason we can say anything we want in America is that we know it makes no difference.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are.
— Julius Evola
America: Land of the free and home of the gun. We are not brave, we are cowards, or we would have done something, anything after Newtown. Instead we did Nothing.
— Jonathan Heatt, Teaching Snapping Turtles How To Chew Bubblegum
Carolyn – I need you to go back into America. We need an innocent heart. We will offer it to Nobununga when he arrives. Do you think you can handle that?”“An innocent heart? In America?” She hesitated.
— Scott  Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char
I worked, and I was excited about the next time the five of us had a joint class. When that time came, Silvia started by asking us what we were passionate about. I scribbled down my family, music, and then, as if the word demanded to be written, justice.
— Kiera Cass, The Elite
Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?""Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie."Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return.
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.
— Chris Hedges
I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.
— Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
If America is to be strong in the future, Americans must see America as home, not divided by race or region. Build American jobs for the future and come together with compassion to solve problems.
— Phil Mitchell, A Bright New Morning: An American Story
I wanted, as all men do, to belong. To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national back.
— Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story
...I have a theory about why and how all this has happened to you.Instead of having to earn it, you have been handed the presidency, the same way you've come by everything else in your life. Money and name alone have opened every door for you. Without effort or hard work or intelligence, or ingenuity, you have been bequeathed a life of privilege...So it's no wonder you think you deserved to be named President. You didn't earn it or win it- therefore it must be yours!
— Michael Moore
America isn’t that far from totalitarianism.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
O America, I am your Liberty, and you are that huddled mass yearning to breathe free. I am your Lighthouse, the One beaconing [yea, beckoning], and you are that wayfarer—strayed, grayed, and frayed … Now, return, you tempest-tost; lift up your gaze to the lighted torch aloft the golden door and come home.
— Maurice Suwa, The Lamb's Epistle: The Living Lord's Final Word to a Dying World
American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book...Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past...How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people...In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their life.
— Fei Xiaotong
That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said "On the Road." He smiled, said, "That was my favorite book at sixteen." At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.
— Sarah Vowell
I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.
— James Joyce
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
[Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling...[yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.
— Harriet Martineau
Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way.
— Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosphical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence
Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.
— Kamila Shamsie
If an eagle be imprisonedon the back of a coin,and the coin tossedinto the sky,the coin will spin,the coin will flutter,but the eagle will never fly.
— Henry Dumas
Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.
— Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education
A man's life consist not of the things he possess, nor Facebook likes and approval.But some of it damn sure consist of his favorite hobbies and love of girls with guns
— Herbert M. Brunner
America: A place where Realists have the freedom to be Idealists.
— Dortha Jackson, Seeds
And one by one, driven to exhaustion, trapped by fence and horses and bewilderment, under an immaculate sky the mythic creatures died. They died not in mercy, not in the majesty which was their due, but as the least of life, accursed of nature. They died in the dust of insult and the spittle of lead.There was more here than profaned the eye or ear or nose or heart. There was more here than mere destruction. The American soul itself was involved, its anthropology.We are born with buffalo blood upon our hands. In the prehistory of us all, the atavistic beasts appear. They graze the plains of our subconscious, they trample through our sleep, and in our dreams we cry out our damnation. We know what we have done, we violent people. We know that no species was created to exterminate another, and the sight of their remnant stirs in us the most profound lust, the most undying hatred, the most inexpiable guilt. A living buffalo mocks us. It has no place or purpose. It is a misbegotten child, a monster with which we cannot live and which we cannot live without. Therefore we slay, and slay again, for while a single buffalo remains, the sin of our fathers, and hence our own, is imperfect. But the slaughter of the buffalo is part of something larger. It is as though the land of Canaan into which we were led was too divine, and until we have done it every violence, until we have despoiled and murdered and dirtied every blessing, until we have erased every reminder of our original rape, until we have washed our hands of the blood of every other, we shall be unappeased. It is as though we are too proud to be beholden to Him. We cannot bear the goodness of God.
— Glendon Swarthout
With all the fucked up things going on in the world, just the fact that we can wake up in the morning is kind of a miracle.
— John Zorn
What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.
— George Saunders
America's libraries are the fruits of a great democracy. They exist because we believe that memory and truth are important. They exists because we believe that information an knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person but rather the province of all who seek to learn. A democratic society holds these institutions in high regard.
— Robert S Martin
Our dedication to charity guides our purpose. The love of laughter inspires our vision. The generous support of supporters, friends and fans along with the finest businesses in Houston and throughout America helps drive our mission. Thank you to those who generously donate to one or all of the charities Sol-Caritas supports.
— Carlos Wallace
The United States has never been in a united state, it has never been a united state. It never will. Lines on screens and paper do not change that.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
I couldn't open up a magazine, you couldn't read a newspaper, you couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the obesity epidemic in America.
— Morgan Spurlock
It is easy to put down Frances Trollope as a Tory embittered by her American business failure. But her observations on American manners, confirmed by many other observers foreign and domestic, actually provide a sharply drawn picture of daily life in the young republic. Most observers at the time agreed with her in finding Americans obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and relatively uninterested in leisure activities. Not only Tories but reformers like Martineau and Charles Dickens angered their hosts by complaining of the overwhelmingly commercial tone of American life, the worship of the 'almighty dollar.' Americans pursued success so avidly they seldom paused to smell the flowers. A kind of raw egotism, unsoftened by sociability, expressed itself in boastful men, demanding women, and loud children. The amiable arts of conversation and cooking were not well cultivated, foreigners complained; Tocqueville found American cuisine 'the infancy of the art' and declared one New York dinner he attended 'complete barbarism.' Despite their relatively broad distribution of prosperity, Americans seemed strangely restless; visitors interpreted the popularity of the rocking chair as one symptom of this restlessness. Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor. Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the tendency toward social segregation of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their occupations, the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and children.
— Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century....
— John Horne Burns, The Gallery
Healing in America is being able to call it our home, to build a future for our children, to still believe in tough times, to remember our forefathers, and stepping forward together towards a common solution
— Phil Mitchell, A Bright New Morning: An American Story
We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger — I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in!
— Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people.
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
Maybe America didn't need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we.
— Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.
— Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.
— Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
America. Where property damage is a greater offense than genocide.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park.And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman’s family.
— Chris Bohjalian, The Light in the Ruins
His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?
— Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
He’s America in action — opposed to quality.
— James Purdy, Cabot Wright Begins
The policies the US government is following are dangerous for its citizens. It's true that you can bomb or buy out anybody that you want to, but you can't control the rage that's building in the world. You just can't. And that rage will express itself in some way or the other. Condemning violence when a section of your economy is based on selling weapons and making bombs and piling up chemical and biological weapons? When the soul of your culture worships violence? On what grounds are you going to condemn terrorism, unless you change your attitude toward violence?
— Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
See, this is what the United States of America is all about.You can wrestle a thousand bears and chew on a billion knives but in the end, you are only as good as the dude who stops you from dying of a gunshot while fucking a coyote.
— Cory O'Brien, Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology
A year ago he had been in America. Two years ago he had been straight. Tonight he was underground, with the remains of the bogey man, lit by the torches of the children who had killed him.
— Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors
[America]'s higher education system is excellent, both in terms of quality and accessibility. Here anybody can go to college. Many countries simply can't accommodate many students. And by the way, most people who came here in the seventies came to get an education. They didn't wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to America to be free.' they said, 'I'll go there to get an education.' That's an important distinction. It was only after they were here for a while that they fully appreciated the freedoms we enjoy here.
— Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran
When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there’s no one to point fingers at you. It’s just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can’t do shit.
— Alex Latimer, The Space Race
Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, twenty-four centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens.
— Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order
Every part of Nigeria is blessed.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
I love Las Vegas because it's the one city less classy than Los Angeles.
— J. Richard Singleton
Los Angeles is a city made up of refugees from better cities.
— J. Richard Singleton
They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women.
— Alan Moore
America is so rich and fat, because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.
— Michael Gold
Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918.
— Cat Winters, In the Shadow of Blackbirds
This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it's a lie but you buy into it and that's all that matters.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Those who have committed no faults want no pardon. We are only defending what we deem our indisputable rights.
— George Washington
And I thought, y’know, I mean…this is crazy. I mean, the only thing that determines what country you belong to is where you happened to be born? What is a country, anyway? It’s not, y’know, “purple mountain’s majesty” or “fruited plains,” whatever the hell that means. I mean, America isn’t a place, it’s an ideal. It could happen in the Sahara Desert and still be America. For that matter, I’m the child of immigrants. My father’s lived and worked in this country for the past three decades. And he’s somehow more or less American than some redneck who uses Osama bin Laden for toilet paper? How the hell do you measure something like that?
— Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Indecision Now! A Libertarian Rage
I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.
— Henry Johnson Jr
Helping each other out, that's America.
— Chris Kyle, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
American dream,a spouse,a brace of children,cuddly pets,coffee-table books,rusted skeleton keys,plastic cauliflower bags,business cards of business-card printers,a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day,all echoes and loneliness.
— Brian D'Ambrosio, Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008
The American political system is like fast food--mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things...and everybody wants some.
— P.J. O'Rourke
The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
— John F. Kennedy
That had been the end of Communism. I had a feeling watching the tape that America would be next, but for once I kept my mouth shut. In my silence I felt our common ground: here we were, two men, neither young, neither with money, neither earning a penny or holding down a job or owning a house, both thoroughly confused by the way the world was turning.
— Don J. Snyder, The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found
All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off.
— Don J. Snyder
It didn't get much more patriotic than sex in a Chevy on the Fourth of July. God bless America.
— Kate Meader, Flirting with Fire
To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.
— David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life
Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let 'em know: WEOUTCHEA.
— Eddie Huang
Since Ireland’s independence declaration was a century older, I could not be sure if his self-evident truths meant as much as they would in America.
— Jennifer     Harrison, Perverse Wonderland
There is no more contemptible sound than a gunshot.
— Jonathan Heatt
He who runs with the platypus is no more a man than he who swallows chesnuts
— Chief Long Spear Who Hunts Beavers
I consider myself an American African because we did not come by choice.
— Alafia Stewart
Liberia gave life, America gives me a DREAM.
— Henry Johnson Jr
... walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man's ancient history. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he's going farther away to look for other planets, very good. But know thyself first. That is what I would tell my American friend.
— tsegaye gebre medhin
Something about being that close to him all the time made my bones feel weak.
— Kiera Cass, The Elite
I was stunned into silence, the way I always was when he touched the sky places of my heart.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
How many senators have taken their conception of what America can do from what they’ve seen on the American movie screen?
— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know
But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling “the Republic of Imagination.” I think of it as Nabokov’s “somehow, somewhere” or Alice’s backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane.
— Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. “A native of America who cannot read or write,” said John Adams, “is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake.
— Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
The most pressing problem facing America can't be solved in Washington DC. True hope and change can't be found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It can only be found at the foot of the cross on Calvary.
— Todd Starnes, God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values
Everyone I have spoken with about working with the Russians in space exploration believes that the United States has learned a great deal from Russia and that Russia has learned a great deal from the United States – and that the entire international space partnership is much better because of it.
— Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority.
— Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I'm all groan up in America.
— Brian Spellman
In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility. And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
— George Bernard Shaw, The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home
We essentially had to build a docking mechanism between the two capsules. We didn't have to share a lot of data, and we did that at the height of the Cold War, which was pretty symbolic." –Bill Gerstenmaier
— Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
That Yank glean is long gone anyway; money, sex, power, it’s gone global – no one has a monopoly on it anymore. The towering skyscrapers of New York had fallen long before the second plane; we all knew it. The twang of the Yank accent doesn’t give girls that twinge these days, even the dollar sign is looking dated, its day long past. No, America doesn’t have it anymore.But then nowhere does. We don’t chop the world up by borders anymore, don’t slice peoples and dice continents. It’s all a sweltering mess, a fucking free-for-all. We went global centuries ago, today we’ve gone digital, and digital doesn’t have borders.
— Matthew Selwyn, ****: The Anatomy of Melancholy
It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned.
— David B. Lentz, AmericA, Inc.: A Novel in Stream of Voice
Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson’s and Chapters.
— Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Hundreds would die, but not the thing they died for.
— Esther Forbes
There is a story I always tell my students...when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn’t speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word “exit” which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :”No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success
— Pablo
We'll when he lets his guard down he's okay. Like when he just talks without checking his words or you catch him just looking at something like... He's really looking for the beauty in it.
— Kiera Cass, The Selection
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.
— James     Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
You're the best gay friend I've ever had!
— America talking to France
They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes--que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!--while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
When did a free country start to mean free enterprise? Who sold Democracy out for a golden calf we got to idolize?
— Trevor D. Richardson, Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light.
— Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays
[I] would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less "African" than actual Africans that calling ourselves 'African American' is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa -and we stand up and insist that we, too, are 'African' because Jesse Jackson said so?
— John McWhorter
Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.
— John dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
. . . On either side of them the essence of honky tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini golf. 	“Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red and black striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people, and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic/ arcane rites of summer along Route 1 in Maine. And now all these Americans were gone. . . .	 Stephen King, from The Stand p. 303 304
— Stephen King, The Stand
Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain.
— Joseph Heller, Something Happened
Unfortunately for him he looked more like an innocent man on America’s terror watch-list rather than a gallant Viking possessing all the benefits of modernity. More like a villain in a Western fairy tale with his slicked-bouffant obsidian hair rather than the long sun-like curls that all great saviors of the poor have been obliged to possess. I squinted to the side towards him for a second and he caught my gaze almost immediately; his inky irises were comfortable enough to hold my stare indefinitely, his pupils seemed entirely ravenous as opposed to the feminist preferred oceanic turquoise, which for them is a physical demarcation of emotional sensitivity. He seemed like an uncanny bad guy any which way I looked at him, except of course, by his actions thus far…
— Bruce Crown, Forlorn Passions
It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
The reason America is in its death-throes is because America has lost moral authority.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
The fish does not know it is wet. America is immersed in violence. The violence is in our souls. The enemy is within.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.
— Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up
America has a unique type of slavery that looks like freedom.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
[But] I have come across anything so painfully beautiful as that kiss. I wish it was something I could save and share with the world so I could tell the universe: this is what it's like
—  this is how it feels when you fall.
But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5-o-'clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it. Underneath all that white noise there's a lack.
— Andrea Portes, Hick
If Americans simply choose to vote for the person who has a D or an R by their name, we will get what we deserve, which is what we have now.
— Ben Carson, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future
Anyone who is truly crazy, in my book, wouldn't be able to understand the dialectic of crazy and not-crazy. Listen, I've worked for the pharmaceutical companies, they have a vested belief in making you believe that if you have a chemical imbalance you need them to be 'cured' of your current issues and personality. Indefinitely. Imagine diagnosing personality only in terms of its negative aspects. Does this strike you as a strategy designed for health? The only way to deal with a problem is to fucking deal with it. Get inside what positive motivation, what intention, makes you behave in the way you are... and how you could maybe satisfy that need in a healthier or at least more agreeable manner. America wants quick, easy and painless; being a real person is slow, difficult and very messy.
— James Curcio, Join My Cult!
I am a child of the American Century, and I feel a genetic commitment to understanding why it happened, and why I take it so personally.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control.
— Gillian Anderson
America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand."-Harry S. Truman
— Barbara Post-Askin, Reflections of Liberty: Memoir by Barbara Post-Askin
If we are to put an end to division, people from all political persuasions will have to stop fighting one another and seek true unity, not just a consensus that benefits one party.
— Ben Carson, One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future
...And although thus short, we shorten many ways,Living so little while we are alive;In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delightSo unawares comes on perpetual night,And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.
— Anne Bradstreet, Anthology of American Literature, Volume 1: Colonial through Romantic
They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
— Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us. The common principle, which is the establishment of the empire of man on earth, we never lift a finger to defend. We are frightened of any urge which would lift us out of the muck. We fight only for the status quo, our particular status quo. We battle with heads down and eyes closed.
— Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
— Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
I wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.
— Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke
Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.Sincerely yours, P. Soames
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.
— William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
Freedom is not reserved for those unwilling to fight for it.
— Ben Carson
In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Deity, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.Religion's first lesson is humility; its fruit, charity. In the great and sublime ends of Providence, little things are lost, and least of all is he imbued with a right spirit who believes that insignificant observances, subtleties of doctrine, and minor distinctions, enter into the great essentials of the Christian character. The wisest thing for him who is disposed to cavil at the immaterial habits of his neighbor, to split straws on doctrine, to fancy trifles of importance, and to place the man before principles, would be to distrust himself.
— James Fenimore Cooper
Shit, this woman's scary. I'm glad my manager's the short one with the wispy hair and the shaking hands. Milo knows how to get stuff done, but he's about as terrifying as a goldfish.
— C.M. Stunich, Bad Day
Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)