Quotes about America

Birth and death are doors through which you pass from one dream to another. Someone is born on Earth in France as a powerful king, rules for a time, then dies. He maybe reborn in India, and travel in a bullock cart into the forest to meditate. He may next find rebirth in America as a successful businessman; and when he dreams death again, reincarnates perhaps in Tibet as a devotee of Buddha and spend his entire life in a lamasery. Therefore hate none and be attached to no nationality, for sometimes you are a Hindu, sometimes a Frenchman, sometimes an Englishman, or an American or a Tibetan. What is the difference? Each existence is a dream within a dream, is it not?

"What am I standing on? I am standing on America. I wouldn't get to stand here if America backed down when someone told us too!"

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success

The way I was taught, being black was a plus, always. Being a human being, being in America, and being black, all three were the greatest things that could happen to you. The combination was unbeatable.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

American democracy is a chess-game in which pawns imagine themselves to be free individuals with wills of their own: that delusion is one of the rules of the game, without which the game could not continue. I doubt anyone, no matter how sharp and sharp-tongued, could succeed in getting across to high school students how vital an acute mind is for just keeping a grip on one's life and earnings in our mendacious politics and economics. No wonder our school system is devoutly dedicated to demoralizing and blunting such minds.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

I try to explain to them about the aloha spirit.  And it’s that spirit that I am absolutely convinced is what America is looking for right now.

Oh beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountains majesty above the asphalt plain! America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea!

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

I find it interesting that in America, even though most people are more optimistic and most people around the world do view America as the city on the hill and more entrepreneurial and more risk taking and less traditional, still in America most people don't take risks, and most people are pretty traditional. It's actually a relatively small number of people that really are those risk takers, and a relatively small number of people that end up really having an impact on the world, and it doesn't take a lot of people. It just takes a few people who really care and stick with it, and that I think is what America is about.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

No man has a right, in America, to treat any other man TOLERANTLY, for TOLERANCE is the assumption of superiority.

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

Absolute freedom of the press to discuss public questions is a foundation stone of American liberty.

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too"

"The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is"

They (Conservatives) don't get it.  We (Liberals) love America just as much as they do.  But in a differenct way.  You see, they love America the way a four-year-old loves her mommy.  Liberals love America like grown-ups.j  To a four-year-old everything mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes mommy is bad.  Grown-up love means understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow.

FOR AMERICA

As if I really didn’t understand
That I was just another part of their plan
I went off looking for the promise
Believing in the Motherland
And from the comfort of a dreamer’s bed
And the safety of my own head
I went on speaking of the future
While other people fought and bled
The kid I was when I first left home
Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own
But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet
When the truth was known
I have prayed for America
I was made for America
It’s in my blood and in my bones
By the dawn’s early light
By all I know is right
We’re going to reap what we have sown

As if freedom was a question of might
As if loyalty was black and white
You hear people say it all the time-
“My country wrong or right”
I want to know what that’s got to do
With what it takes to find out what’s true
With everyone from the President on down
Trying to keep it from you

The thing I wonder about the Dads and Moms
Who send their sons to the Vietnams
Will they really think their way of life
Has been protected as the next war comes?
I have prayed for America
I was made for America
Her shining dream plays in my mind
By the rockets red glare
A generation’s blank stare
We better wake her up this time

The kid I was when I first left home
Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own
But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet
When the truth was known
I have prayed for America
I was made for America
I can’t let go till she comes around
Until the land of the free
Is awake and can see
And until her conscience has been found

"Why would one give up everything to live on the streets of India, when there are so many wonderful opportunities to be homeless right here in America? Closer to home, and without the expense. Whether you stake your spot and sit in meditative contemplation, or stalk the streets like a raving lunatic, like John The Baptist---others---here or there, will still look upon you with total indifference."

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. ..."

As often as I listen to the worries about China eating the jobs of the West, I hear the concern about the influence of the American way of life in the East. The question is: "Does globalization mean Americanization?" My short answer is no. In measuring globalization, we can count telephone calls, currency flows, trade sums, and so on, but the spread of culture and ideas cannot be so easily measured. Embedded in the present is the unrecognized paradox that culturally, America itself is changing more dramatically than America is changing the world. It is the world that is changing the world. Immigration is reshaping America more profoundly than America's influence around the world.

There are two things that a democratic people will always find very difficult, to begin a war and to end it.

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

George W, Bush is my inspiration. If he can be President, I figure just about anybody can...

Who the holy heck is going to talk all high and mighty like about the J-man and tell me that THIS is the American Dream he’s sitting there all right handed and all, patting Him on the back, saying “Hey, good job Dad.” Where the bloody hell is your SHAME America? Wake the heck on up… Did you all miss the memo where it says The New Deal was all about making sure we didn’t succumb to violent revolution?

Premature Extraction

Actually, when you think about it, this country has had a manhood problem for some time. You can tell the language we use; language always gives us away. What did we do wrong in Vietnam? We 'pulled out'! Not a very manly thing to do. No. When you're fucking people, you're supposed to stay with it and fuck them good; fuck them to death; hang in there and keep fucking them until they're all fucking dead.

But in Vietnam what happened was by accident we left a few women and children alive, and we haven't felt good about ourselves since.

That's why in the Persian Gulf, George Bush had to say, 'This will not be another Vietnam.' He actually said, 'this time we're going all the way.'

Imagine. An American president using the sexual slang of a thirteen-year-old to describe his foreign policy.

And, of course, when it got right down to it, he didn't 'go all the way.' Faced with going into Baghdad he punked out. No balls. Just Bush.

Instead, he applied sanctions, so he'd be sure that an extra half a million brown children would die. And so his oil buddies could continue to fill their pockets.

If you want to know what happened in the Persian Gulf, just remember the first names of the two men who ran that war: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.

Dick and Colon.

Someone got fucked in the ass.

And those brown people better make sure they keep their pants on, because Dick and Colin have come back for an encore.
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