“We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.”
“It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”
“America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.”
“There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as ''American.''”
“I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.”
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.”
“The business of America is business and the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.”
“American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.”
“We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans.”
“The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.”
“At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.”
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
“If you think the United States has stood still, who built The largest shopping center in the world?”
“The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.”
“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.”
“It's difficult to believe that people are still starving in this country because food isn't available.”
“A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”
“Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”
“I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.”
“In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.”
“I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.”
“America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”
“America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.”
“America is a model of force and freedom and moderation -- with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.”
“I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem -- and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?”
“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
“The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.”
“Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be...”
“For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”