America Quotes - Page 279

America once had the clarity of the pioneer ax.

Jayne Anne Phillips . . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.

As I traveled the world over, I traveled everywhere, and I learned so much.

America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long.

One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.

We have arrived at socialized medicine in America. I do not report this as either a good or bad event but simply as something that has happened with hardly anyone realizing it. This is the first result - and probably the most important - of the national health care debate launched last week by President Clinton. Our politics and economy will never again be the same.

What I learned about America is that anything is possible, but sometimes people get into businesses they shouldn't be in. They go in without capital or know how, but their mothers had told them that they could cook, and they're good with people.

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by thatWe always try to find similarities in life, no matter what it is so they're going to try to put you in a box with other African-American quarterbacks - Vick, Newton, Randall Cunningham, Warren MoonThat's the goal. Just to go out and not try to prove anybody wrong but just let your talents speak for themselves.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

Despite its increased dependence on the international economy, America continues to behave as if it were either a closed economy or the leader whom everyone else should automatically follow.

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

A turning point in modern history.

President Bush will come here and there will be new "friends" of America to open a new relationship with the world, new economic fortunes for those who "liberated" them.

Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.

Some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits. And they use our campaign finance system to loot our commons, to steal from our treasury, and the other shared resources of our community - the air, the water, the public lands, the wildlife, the things that belong to all of us that are held in trust for future generations. Corporations cannot act philanthropically in America.

American Horror Story on cable now, it is terrific. There has to be room to re-invent.

I've always liked country music. It's a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

His [Frank Sinatra] voice defined not only a certain period of time, but America and what America meant to the world. Sinatra grew up, as my grandparents did, when being Italian was very, very prejudice against, but they didn't let it bring them down or use it as an excuse.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States’ southern border, Mexico will affect America’s destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.

The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.

I couldn't find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento - Stanley Something-or-other - to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots.

It's partly the Southernization of America, in that the Southern working-class version of redneck is becoming the national version, and it's good-natured, it has humor and, in some ways, it's a performance.