Top 1200 American Democracy Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

People are disappointed when they hear my American accent because they regard 'The Police' as an English band but I've clung to my American-ness all the way.

It is un-American, it is unjust to target any group of folks whether they are African-American, Hispanic, poor or elderly when it comes to access to the vote.

Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again - the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years.

Great American art needs the idea of uninterrupted spaces, like a loft, which itself is something very American.

I always say African American history is the quintessential American story. It's about perseverance and resilience - something everyone can relate to.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.

For good or for bad, India has rejected a more totalitarian approach to how it will deal with its social problems. We would starve but we would not give up our democracy and our love for our freedoms and to deal with these problems in an atmosphere of democracy and the rule of law without necessarily going, sort of resorting to civil disobedience or any kind of violent revolution.

A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost - Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don't hear a word about it.

The largest untapped constituency in American politics are the 300 million American citizens who have been completely left out of the immigration debate.

Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

By now, the corporations that dominate our media, like alcoholic fat cats, treat this situation as theirs by right... Their concept of a diversity of views is the full range of politics and social values from center to far right. The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what they see and hear in the major media is all there is. It is no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say it is no way to maintain a democracy.

I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age - unless you're an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.

The death tax punishes the American dream - making it virtually impossible for the average American family to build wealth across generations.

My every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.

We will rebuild our country with American workers, American iron, American aluminum, American steel. We will create millions of new jobs and make millions of American dreams come true. Our infrastructure will again be the best in the world. We used to have the greatest infrastructure anywhere in the world, and today, we are like a third-world country. We are literally like a third-world country. Our infrastructure will again be the best, and we will restore the pride in our communities, our nation.

I think the American people should know there's already strong influences toward another deployment of American troops in an open-ended commitment.

When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.

The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.

Any American who joins al Qaeda will know full well that they have joined an organization that is at war with the United States. Any American who did that should know well that they in fact are part of an enemy... and that the U.S. will do anything that is possible to destroy that enemy to save American lives.

I've never felt more American than I did when I moved to England. It becomes a real kind of part of your identity: "Oh, Ben. He's the American guy." I think when you say you're from New York you get a different reception then if you just say, "I'm American." So I'd always kind of make sure I was a New Yorker first.

I knew nothing of American History because I didn't pay attention to American History in school. Because I did not see myself in American History in school.

There is nothing antithetical in American history, culture, or traditions to teamwork. Teams were important in America's history - wagon trains conquered the West, men working together on the assembly line in American industry conquered the world, a successful national strategy and a lot of teamwork put an American on the moon first (and thus fare, last). But American mythology extols only the individual...In America, halls of fame exist for almost every conceivable activity, but nowhere do Americans raise monuments in praise of teamwork.

Every American deserves a shot at the American dream.

German women love American men. That's why a lot of American servicemen go to Germany - and never come back.

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Occasionally, I've been asked to do American roles, and once or twice I have, but I don't understand Americans. I don't have any real feeling for American culture.

I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

American Medical Association [AMA] was strongly opposed to any scheme for group practice and to health insurance ... because they are un-American.

Democracy, or "majority rules," is another trick of our society to force us to do things we don't want to do. Even if we actually lived in a pure democracy (and the system we do live in is not even close), where everyone got a single vote on every subject, forcing the minority to obey the majority is no different to one man, if he had the power, forcing everyone else to do what he wanted them to-simply because he could.

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.

The American Dream has really good PR. It's kind of difficult to live in the United States and not on some level be pulled into the allure of the American Dream. It's in the DNA of the country. So, for a population coming out of slavery, desperate to become part of the full life of the United States, it only makes sense that they would embrace this route to the American Dream.

All of a sudden, making a Spanish-American War joke. I think you sort of had to go to probably to an American high school to have remembered that.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.

I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable, established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.

This obsession with leadership... It's not neutral; it's American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it's killing American companies.

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.

Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house."

Can anything be more Un-American than the Un-American committee?

In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.

I think in Pakistan there is already democracy and no dictatorship. And recently a few years ago, the Pakistani people stood against the dictatorship of [Pervez] Musharraf and compelled him to resign. So now it is the people's democracy so I don't think any chance that the people should stand against this administration. Pakistan's situation is different than Egypt. They cannot be compared.

I am an American, not by accident of birth but by choice. I voted with my feet and became an American because I love this country and think it is exceptional.

A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.

France loves American cinema because when an American remake is successful, it makes us money to produce more French films.

Teachers and librarians can be the most effective advocates for diversifying children's and young adult books. When I speak to publishers, they're going to expect me to say that I would love to see more books by Native American authors and African-American authors and Arab-American authors. But when a teacher or librarian says this to publishers, it can have a profound effect.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

Not disown my past or upbringing, but I'd admired American actors, really American movie star - particularly the rebel heroes of the '50s.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

I have an American passport, but I don't always remember I'm an American citizen.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulne­ss while telling carefully constructe­d lies, to hold simultaneo­usly two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradict­ory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.

This is going to be a very transparent Justice Department. But I'm not gonna sacrifice the safety of the American people or our ability to protect the American homeland.

Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O'Reilly personifies American conservatism.

I'm more American than anything else. I grew up in China, but I was fulfilled at a young age by American music. It was my biggest inspiration.