Top 1200 American Tradition Quotes & Sayings

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.

In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.

It's time to realise that tradition is fantastic but if because of tradition and only tradition you lose everyone it's less fantastic so you have to keep some tradition to this sport of course but you also have to live in your century.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.

Despite my great disappointment in American foreign policy, I am very proud of the American tradition of wild land conservation. It is the best tradition and example of land conservation in the world. It goes back a long way.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition.

The urge to break with a tradition is only appropriate when you're dealing with an outdated, troublesome tradition: I never really thought about that because I take the old-fashioned approach of equating tradition with value (which may be a failing). But whatever the case, positive tradition can also provoke opposition if it's too powerful, too overwhelming, too demanding. That would basically be about the human side of wanting to hold your own.

Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.

When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.

The gratification of helping others is a very American tradition and a Judeo-Christian tradition. Now it is great to see young people creating funds and giving back in all sorts of productive ways. It's a terrifically satisfying thing.

As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself.

Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

We often forget that Iran has a long tradition and history with the United States. Iranians have been coming to the United States as students for decades. American businessmen were in Iran developing the oil fields. ...There was an American financial advisor to the Iranian government in the early part of the century.

Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that's O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That's my aim and what I see as my mission.

In a sense the whole American comic tradition had been that of social criticism.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights - the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.

Well, I think I'm trying to be in the middle of two traditions, the French tradition, which is about being fair and staying close to reality, and the American tradition which is about making up a stylized universe, made of shapes and colors.

Ajamu Baraka comes out of the tradition of the African-American intellectuals, the people who really been standing up for African-American rights and economic rights and workers rights.

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future.

You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine, or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible; they deprive you of full citizenship, and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.'

I think that Hillary Clinton has an appreciation that American power needs to be put in the service of American values, which is an American tradition and a pretty good one, and I think she was willing to do that.

For us to ignore by inaction the slaughter of American civilians and American soldiers, whether in nightclubs or airline terminals, is simply not in the American tradition. Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Settling other people's land is an American tradition.

In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.

The Disney tradition - number one, it's a great American classic tradition - and it's something where you don't want to go over certain lines. You want to poke fun, but you don't want to poke fun in a way that's hurtful.

It is within the established American tradition of satire, if America surrenders on this point, the freedom of speech is a relic of history.

My concern is to develop a North American type of anarchism that comes out of the American tradition, or that at least can be communicated to Americans and that takes into consideration that Americans are not any longer people of European background.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

The libertarian creed...offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.

A lot of things occurred to me with shamans in Peru.There were a number of different kinds of experiences that you learn from doing ritual and taking ayahuasca [a common tropical forest hallucinogen] is the key to understanding the native consciousness and perception of the world with the Peruvian shamans that you wouldn't get unless you had been with them, but every shamanic tradition, including the Native American tradition of medicine and cleansing ritual, like the Sun Dance or the sweat lodge.

It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.

I don't feel the individualist anarchists, particularly in the American tradition, including the Transcendental tradition of New England, in any way deserve the derogatory comments that are often made about them by the left. When one gets down to it ultimately, my anarcho-communism stems from a commitment to true individuality. My attempt to recover the power and the right of the individual to control his or her life and destiny is the basis to my anarcho-communism.

It’s like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he’s supposed to change for the worse. It’s silly.

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.

European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.

And," Amber said, practically drooling as she ogled him, "it's tradition for new arrivals to help with the pep rally." Brooklyn quirked her lips in doubt. "Tradition?" "It's a new tradition," Amber shot back. "Clearly the deeper meaning of the word has escaped you.

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.

I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.

Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe in it as its own literary tradition, because your race plays a great factor in how you are seen by the world, and how you see the world; the fact that I'm an Asian American isn't incidental to who I am as a writer. Where it becomes difficult is defining what, if anything identifiable at all, makes an Asian American book an Asian American book, other than the fact of its creator being Asian. And I'd argue that there is nothing identifiable beyond that.

What I'd like to see developing is an American radicalism, libertarian in character, which relies, however weak, faint, and even mythic these traditions may be, on the American libertarian tradition. I don't mean right-wing libertarianism obviously.

Offering thanks in the midst of tragedy is an American tradition, . even during a bloody Civil War.

Even though there's a lot of horror from Asia in the American cinematic tradition, I hadn't seen Asians at the center of it.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.

Dick Clark is an American icon. I am honored that he has entrusted me with such a role in this national tradition.

The principle of self defense is an American tradition that began at Lexington and Concord.

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

I grew up in Sweden. It's a profoundly Americanized country. We have a strong tradition of Americana and always had non-dubbed American television, and embracing American culture a lot, so I always knew that I wanted to go to America.

It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view.

When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.

Every time a bookseller hands a child a book, they are doing something that is the heart and soul of the American dream and the American ideal. It's a very sacred tradition.

Philanthropy, charity, giving voluntarily and freely... call it what you like, but it is truly a jewel of an American tradition.

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

I appreciate the history and tradition of Notre Dame. I also appreciate the history and tradition of Oklahoma, and I have been part of building that tradition here.